rhapsody

SURRREALISTIC TRAGICOMEDY/DREAMWORLD/ HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Whoever, while dreaming, says “I am dreaming,” even if they are audibly speaking, has just as little right to do so as someone who, in a dream, says “It is raining” while it actually is raining—even if the dream really is connected to the sound of the rain.
(From: Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty.)

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, the composer George Gershwin asked himself: “What is American music?” From his musical reflections and research emerged the jazz-classical composition Rhapsody in Blue. In the same year, on the other side of the Atlantic, André Breton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto¹—six years after the end of the First World War.
The destruction, violence, and terror carried out in the name of faith, nation, and order were still present in minds and bodies.

The artists of Surrealism, while lying in the trough between waves, could already feel the pull of inflation, xenophobia, and unemployment beneath their feet, and they countered the towering wave crest² with a higher reality of dreams, the unconscious, and associative thinking.

One hundred years later, Azeret Koua, director and author of rhapsody, asks: What does a celebration of theatre look like in 2024? How can we find correspondences for a world subjected to multiple crises, for a country being swept over by a blue wave? How do we make ourselves heard for those who seem to find no place in this situation, as staying increasingly becomes a risk and leaving is bound up with uncertainty and fear?

The curtain rises. Behind it: a mirror, a projection surface, and a table at which the representatives of power are seated together. The familiar spirits of the age assemble. Their phrases echo through the room. One person joins them, is invited to sit at the table. The ground beneath their feet begins to spin.

The fires that have been set do not die down; differing worldviews and anxieties captivate the dreamers and merge with pop-cultural quotations and rituals. The audience itself begins to dream. More figures appear; they seem related to one another, yet who they are remains a mystery. New transformations rearrange the stage and the atmosphere of the dream. When what has been experienced is finally woven into one’s own story, we wake up—and the next morning, around the breakfast table, the words and images still reverberate.⁴

Rhapsody puts its finger on a wound that hurts—a wound that cannot be healed.

Age recommendation: 16+
World premiere: October 24, 2024
Duration: 85 minutes

Content Notes:
LIGHT: During one scene, video and lighting include strobe effects. These light stimuli may trigger seizures in people with epilepsy.

Footnotes:

Among other things, it states: “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which seem so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality—surreality, if one may say so. Toward its conquest I strive, certain of not attaining it, yet too unconcerned with my death not to at least weigh the joys of such a possession.”
The power of waves has fascinated the author of this announcement text ever since, at the age of ten, they were swallowed and pressed down by the Atlantic during a vacation in Brittany and washed back onto the beach with a pounding heart and saltwater in their lungs.
If any place lends itself to collective dreaming, it is the theatre. Stimulated by the signs inherent in the performing arts, the audience is invited to experience and to feel, and sometimes recognition emerges—which is why not only David Lynch knows that a notebook by the bed can save lives.
Is this the bracket that connects theatre, Surrealism, and historical consciousness? This text truly cannot answer that. But perhaps it was enjoyable to read, leading you to go and see rhapsody at Theaterhaus Jena. Or perhaps it prompted you to form your own thoughts. But for that, after all, one doesn’t need an introductory text. Or does one?