Poetic and enigmatic: a Needcompany performance opens Steirischer Herbst

‘We’ll manage it’. This was the unmistakable theme that the intendant Veronica Kaup-Hasler thought up for the Steirischer Herbst, which started on 23 September. With as subtitle: ‘On the shift in cultural cartographies’. And what could be more predestined for such a shift than Mahler’s Lied von der Erde?

There is the ancient Chinese lyricism, and there is the Jugendstil writer Hans Berthge – indisputably a poetic adapter and not a translator – and there is also Mahler, who, when composing this, even though only temporarily, wrote his way out of the urge to compose a ‘last’, so-called ninth symphony. And now there is Needcompany, dancing across the borders between metiers, which has adapted the symbolically charged Der Abscheid from the Lied von der Erde as… well, as what exactly? It’s exciting when a journey into the unknown starts and the place of arrival / the place of being, has still not been unambiguously established.

Birds and eroticism

It is a black & white land, a country where eroticism is estimated at least as highly as ornithology. The attractive, remarkably dressed female birds (the dancers Mélissa Guérin and Sarah Lutz) are courted. And both of them approach the two men in an extremely active manner. It’s provocative. Mohamed Toukabri, dressed in white, is a dancer, and his colleague in black is a singer, a gifted vocalist! – but he also holds his own as a dance partner. Yet his main task is to sing passages from the vocal score of Der Abscheid unaccompanied, scraps of Mahler’s music that almost come wafting in, often in a precariously deep voice. His singing, with precise intonation, results in islands of electronic sound. Sound and visual art go hand in hand, because the dancing ‘birds’ are in fragile surroundings made of porcelain: small objects reminiscent of leaves are suspended from countless threads and hung up close together from rods and stacks of armchairs. These objects are set in motion as if by magic, and start to tinkle gently like little windmills.

‘Der Abscheid’ was not retained as a title for this poetic and extremely puzzling and surreal production (teamwork by Grace Ellen Barkey and Lot Lemm). It has been called FOREVER, and this production will forever provide stuff for interpretation, because everyone who saw the premiere in Graz of this highly unusual, surreal, but fascinatingly fine paraphrase of Mahler, lasting slightly more than an hour, will interpret it in a different way.