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“Blackberry paradise”
Fatal smack
Performance group artscenico shows plays about death and eating
Culture, April 07, 2008, Martina Herzog

There are many ways to kill yourself. Starvation and gluttony are two possibilities. In the Dortmund-based Depot, the performance group artscenico presents its staging "Blackberry Paradise), subtitled “The Gourmet, the Hungry, the Death and the Girl").

The beginning: On a screen there is a young Japanese woman, singing about love with a serious look on her face, while the audience takes the seats in the Theater. Then it is getting dark. The camera leads us through the February woods, shows a path through dead leaves and bare-branched birches and thin oak trees with ominous music. Then, the camera rests in its position, the tension dissolves and for the first time you can hear the voice-over (Rolf Dennemann). He has arrived in the "Brombeerparadies", the speaker explains, to starve himself to death in a plastic tent, equipped with water, pain killers, a radio and a dictation machine. The chronicle of death lasts 62 days. The messages are sometimes trivial, sometimes thoughtful. What you can see is that his decision to die comes from a feeling of weariness and dispensability. "The circumstances did not fit", the speaker tells us, therefore he "would like to move on to another world", making it sound as if it was as trivial as changing residence. This starving person shows two tendencies: the trivialization of death and the glorification of his suicide. An average life that shall turn special because of a spectacular death.

...He takes much care of hygiene because "people prefer clean corpses". And why to choose this suffering and slow death by starvation? Perhaps because to be rescued before the end. A rescue against all odds would be the "will of a god". But as much as I'd like to see the distinctiveness, there is only a nightmarish chronicle of gradual organic failure and the pain of death by starvation. This is achieved with music, nature sounds, murmur of the rain and bird calls. On the screen you can see pictures of the wood. Sometimes there can be seen a dancer behind the screen. Rieke Steierl does not move about a lot but everything is full of dynamic drive because the image in the foreground suggests movement. She shivers and trembles and flutters and gives a little bit of beauty to this hopeless situation. She is also the woman in white that appears on the screen to the dying person, a vision he was hungering for in his loneliness. From day 50 on, the chronicle gets nebulous, the last days are only figures on the screen. When it is over, the shoots begin to sprout and spring comes.

The antagonist of the second part (Matthias Scheuring) also dies by his own hand. Nevertheless, he dies quite untroubled and full of pleasure. He does not aspire to die, but he hazards the consequences as the price for his intense sensual experiences. The gourmet knows what he likes to taste, he is a sophisticated eater with a sense for culinary nuances. He can rave about fried potatoes with a childish enthusiasm so that mere listening to him makes your mouth water. The voice of his conscience is a young woman. Danielle Clamer is the voice of the medical sanity, she shows him the physical consequences of his gluttony, she brings arguments. It may sound strange, but the young woman with her well-tempered self-control appears to be a little jealous of this intensity, when she nestles up against him and her look follows him almost hungrily. In the end, she lies before him on a white cloth, dead or only sleeping, while he pleasurably smokes his cigarillo, with a nasal tube in his nose.
And what have these two extreme characters in common? At the end of it all, they have brought themselves to death. Both are living for this world: the first one with the staging of his own will, with half a glance at the posterity, the other one living in culinary pleasure. However, the starving man is defeated in his death; his dieing remains a grotesque play close to illusion; his fight for character is so miserable. However, the gourmet is the confident: weak because of showing us our weaknesses in an exaggerated way, yet again strong in the conscious affirmation of it.

“SWEAT”
Melancholic confessions of a destitute life.
„Breaking into a Sweat“ - part two of the trilogy „Refuge“

The group of desperate youngsters played by members of the theatre group artsenico that appeared, back in May, in director Rolf Dennemann‘s production „Stray Dog of the Strawberry Field“ at a waste land in Derne, Germany, have grown up. Part two of Dennemann‘s trilogy „Refugium“ sees them as alcoholics beaten, still homeless and aimlessly wandering through life. Entitled „Breaking Out in a Sweat or the Life of Monika and her Franz-Josef“, the second part of this trilogy premiered on Thursday at the „Theater im Depot“ in Dortmund, Germany. Monika is in love with Franz-Josef who beats her. Life on the streets is frustrating and exhausting and the child Monika miscarried is simply discarded. Breaking out of this vicious circle seems impossible because the love that binds them together, however destructive, is just too strong. Dennemann depicts those scenes, that could potentially cause the audience to break into a fearful sweat, with the utmost delicacy and without violence. Enacted behind two gauze curtains, they form a complete picture of a destitute existence. Monika (sensitively played by Manuela Stüsser) is seen on a park bench, in court, in a bar, in a shelter for the homeless or as a prostitute on the street, talking about her life without bitterness, her voice almost reduced to a mere whisper. The various roles of the other people who accompany Monika on her journey are played by Susan Erentok, Julia König, Manuela Stüsser and Nora Krehan, who constantly assume different characters. Rather than a social drama, „Breaking Out into a Sweat“ is the sad and heavy-hearted depiction of a couple on the brink of despair. Despite its violent undertones, the play is touching rather than disturbing because it follows the story of a person who endures pain rather than inflicts it.

Straying dogs

WAZ May 3rd.2006
Lost lives in inhospitable wastelands
Children and youths play a small group of people between a destroyed past and an annihilated future. The performance on a strip of wasteland in Gneisenau-Brache creates a depressing scene. The sky is grey; it's drizzling. It is 12 degrees but it feels a lot colder. It is draughty on this strip of cheerless wasteland: black ash, birch grey-green, pylons. The shaft towers of the Zeche Gneisenau mine are at the back of the audience, who is cloaked in blankets. 15 minutes of relative silence; church bells toll in the distance and one hears the sound of the B 236n. May 1st, premier of part one of the three-part generation cycle, "Refugium", the most recent project from "artscenico". Director Rolf Dennemann staged a performance of "stray dog in a strawberry field" with 16 children and young people. An insight into the future after some type of catastrophe. An unreal scene which is reminiscent of science fiction films. The actors seem lost, just like the last human beings. No protection anywhere. People without a future, left behind between the remains: two tip sacks full of old clothes onto a pile and burrow inside. A boy with a walking stick crouches like an old man on a stone and plays a mouth harmonica. No one speaks, no one laughs, no one cries. A woman cries out through the wasteland, tumbles and pulls herself together again, going on aimlessly again, falls. A woman in black works squatting at a grave. Two try to make a hut out of wooden boards. A pregnant woman comes from somewhere, disappears and returns with a child, which she buries immediately. No one speaks - about what though? Between a destroyed past and an annihilated future, the present vegetates. Life of minimums not even challenged. A pack of youths appear from behind a smoking mound. Armed with sticks, they destroy the last bits, injure, rob, kill. But here, death is not a drama; no one mourns their own end.

The young lay actors, pupils from the North of town, form still and moving pictures in this depressing Refugium. They are serious and committed to the task.