in camera
A dance piece inspired by Jean Paul Sartre's theatre play "No Exit" for three performers in silence.
© photography Sofia Pintzou
Imagine spending your time forever after your death in a room with two people you have never met before.
There is nothing in the room, no furniture, no books, no music or anything else to distract you.
Just an empty room where the light never goes out.
And this uninterrupted silence in which nothing can penetrate from the outside to the inside.
You will have to learn to be content with yourself and in the unwanted company of two people.
That is hell.
In Sartre's play "No Exit" (French: "Huis Clos") hell serves as a metaphor for the problem of human relationships. Three people, banished into a closed room after their death, have to deal with themselves and the other people. Sartre draws an interwoven woman-man-woman relationship, a menage a trois, in which the protagonists try to wrest the lies of their lives from each other.
With the much quoted sentence "Hell is other people" Sartre however means that one goes to hell of one's own free will by making oneself dependent on the judgment of the others. As the founder of existentialism, Sartre believed that man was free and fully responsible for his actions. In the choreographic examination of the theatrical material, the initial situation serves as a leitmotif. Sartre's sense of the absurd and at times comical (which he often missed in productions of "Huis Clos" by other directors) draw inspiration to take the drama out of the play and create a more subtle version of a "hell". Imagine yourself watching from another room next door to the room of Sartre's play. Three women are having a silent conversation, looking for a way to get along and communicate. Alternating between self-assertion and self-abandonment, in camera stands for man's inability to communicate.
concept, choreography, stage/ Eva Baumann
dance/ Eva Baumann, Akemi Nagao/Yui Kawaguchi, Katrin Schafitel/Marcela Ruiz Quintero
rehearsal assistant/ Daura Hernandez Garcia
premier
december 17th, 2013
Theaterhaus Stuttgart
resumption 2014
Theater OST- im Depot Stuttgart
in camera is a production by Eva Baumann, funded by the City Arts Council of Stuttgart, the foundation of LBBW and LaFT Baden-Württemberg