During the KunstFestSpielen in the Herrenhäuser Gärten in Hannover, Jan Lauwers & Needcompany are above all else presenting an ambitiously conceived sensational production

A man steps onto the stage. 
The man says: "I am..."
And then things become complicated.
An analysis.

Picture in your mind’s eye an empty space. A void existing somewhere in the midst of a dance group, storytellers, and a prog-rock concept album taken from the seventies. This is the setting that Jan Lauwers & Needcompany have selected for The blind poet, their latest production. It is also the way in which the audience should, and indeed ought to, look at the presentation: not as a performance within a delineated, defined space, self-sufficient and in its self-sufficiency quite content, but rather as a sequence of personal tales arising and unfolding out of the auditorium, burgeoning forth, sprouting from the roots of people’s family trees into historical truths. People that create art, that find themselves caught up in the world, in political entanglements. These are stories of people that are products of a system which they merely grasp but are no longer capable of influencing.

Just like in the circus

These performers step onto the stage and say: "I am..." For The blind poet, the members of Needcompany have drawn up their family trees. Seven of them each tell their individual stories: accompanied by a chorus, choreographed movements, as a quiet tale, as a country song, as a rock song. What all of these stories have in common is that they relocate the actors within some historical context, somewhere amongst the Vikings, at Troy, in Sumatra, at the time of the Crusades or of the Boxer Rebellion. The blind poet depicts the personal as political, history as a kaleidoscopic succession of stories, and people as products of history. The text, the verbal narrative, frequently occupies front stage. Yet, The blind poet is at the same time a very physical play that borrows a great number of elements from the dance theatre and demands much concentrated movement and effort on the part of the actors.

That the whole production does not come apart is primarily due to the fact that The blind poet seeks rescue in exaggeration: garish canary-yellow costumes and clown make-up recall similarities with circus performances, far-fetched clichés make for comic effects, a symbolic image that appears plucked straight out a David Lynch movie, such as a dead horse on a scale, two robotic contraptions borrowed from science fiction that are challenging one another in a duel with lances. The finale is dominated by a black, inflatable character that bears a striking resemblance to a colossal bacterium.

No man is an island

The blind poet is a mega co-production of Elisabeth Schweeger in her final season as artistic director of the Herrenhäuser Festspiele in Hannover. The former Intendant from Frankfurt has a penchant for refractory, unique oeuvres that are difficult to understand. This year’s production also featured music by Harry Partch, a composer who seemed under the impression that the music octave consisted not just of the customary 8 notes but, rather, of 32. One was also treated to an arrangement of Der Ring der Nibelungen that lasted for 16 hours, edited by Georg Nussbaumer and passed through some gazillion transformative filters.

For her final days with the Herrenhäuser Festspielen, Schweeger could not have wished for a better piece. On the one hand, because it considers Art, and hence likewise the Herrenhäuser Festspiele, as one element within a wider political system and, on the other, because a number of the works, concerts, and installations performed and displayed at the festival are not necessarily striving to express something of deeper meaning but simply wish to entertain. It once again demonstrates how major themes, even without many frills and embellishments, may contain many layered meanings and still remain accessible.

The fact is that, the more mysterious and difficult to grasp the presentation is in its symbolic significance, the more fun it is. Needcompany muddies the waters with a lot of easily accessible music, so often takes recourse to exaggeration as a stylistic element that even the tale of an alcoholic father given to bouts of family abuse tickles the laughing muscles and cancer can be swept aside with a casual joke. Underneath this thin layer of entertainment, however, lurks the simple and, at the same time, serious realisation that no man is an island. Everybody and everything is related to everybody and everything else and individual tales form the roots of what we commonly perceive as our human history. This then is the message that Jan Lauwers & Needcompany bring to the stage eclectically and in the best theatrical rogue and rascal tradition. It is done with such intensity that you are not likely to forget it, and with such casual nonchalance you practically ignore it.