deviant GaZe

Heiner Müller, HAMLETMACHINE – Something is rotten in this age of hope

Living the historical end of the Age of Hope, we witness an era of disintegration and the return of the zombies of fascism. The essentialist subject of Modernity, The Man of rationality, of economic liberalism, of perpetual linear growth and ecstatic consumerism, is dying. But the ideologies of subjectivity leave always their mark on the human body.
 
In Heiner Müller’s emblematic play “Die Hamletmaschine” the body collapses under the burden of History and leaving behind Hamlet’s psychological interiority, engages into a perpetual schizoid becoming. It becomes Hamlet, the performer playing Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, Ophelia, Electra, Rosa Luxemburg, Ulrike Meinhof, and many other historical and fictional personas.
 
The body on stage is transformed from classical and autonomous to suicidal, fragmented, hybridized.. It becomes a battlefield, a container of memory, a landscape of History. Upon “the ruins of Europe”, the performer, now as a metaphor for the human body, alludes to the advent of a new subjectivity, creating the hope for a new political vision, a new utopia.
 
This deviant GaZe production with its “human installation” form and pioneering stage language is based on theatre’s primal mater -Body, Voice, Energy, Metamorphosis-.
 
A political performance in dialogue with one of the most important texts of contemporary theatre; a performance that contemplates on the idea of Europe falling apart.
 
 
deviant GaZe
-a component of forces of the gaze FOR and AGAINST the human -
 
HAMLETMACHINE© henschel SCHAUSPIEL Theaterverlag Berlin GmbH 1988.
Produced as inalienable manuscript. All rights to the text, including single paragraphs, reserved, particularly of performance by professional or non-professional stages, of public presentation, of book publication and translation, of transmission, film adaptation or recording for radio broadcast, television or other audio-visual media. Licences for use may be contractually received through: henschel SCHAUSPIEL Theaterverlag Berlin GmbH