“The Walking Forest” by Christiane Jatahy (Wiener Festwochen)

Yes, please! Give me more performances where the audience is fooled into believing that they are in charge of the situation. At first, “The Walking Forest” is set up as an art installation. There're four screens and five stools in front of each one. Stories told by people living under corrupt and/or totalitarian governments (like Syria but also Brazil) are shown on screens, camera focusing mainly on details surrounding the narrator not for the benefit of aesthetics (although the poetics of the videos are superb) but to protect the protagonists. We've heard these stories before and “The Walking Forest” is intensely aware of it as there's a bar where everyone can get some wine or water to make the stories go down easier, as we've used to listen to them as background to our daily lives. Most audience members feel at home enough not to notice that there's something else going on. That one by one, those audience members who have been given a radio transmitter and headphones are guided to interact with the performers, disguised as a bartender or a fellow attendee. Most people don't even seem to think twice when the bartender they want to order wine from stands behind the counter, holding a dead fish. Also, one should never trust a mirror wall, even behind the bar counter, as it might always be two-sided … Not to give too much away, let me just say that the protagonists of the second part of “The Walking Forest” are us, the oblivious consumers of horrific tales from far away (it should also be noted that the production is an adaptation of The Cursed Play by Shakespeare). I've never really agreed with the definition of political theater as something that also has to make political statements on a performative level, but after “The Walking Forest” I'm convinced that a performance that does not challenge what a performance is, can never be truly political even if the theme addressed seems to be.

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