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Premiere of “Our Life in the Woods”

Premiere of “Our Life in the Woods”

Disco haze wafts through the cooled old building on the site of the gasworks like nocturnal clouds. Instead of animal screams, cool mechanical tones bounce off the tiled walls, and a few delicate, plastic decorative trees are reminiscent of the jungle. Not the most suitable atmosphere for the world premiere of the dystopian short novel by French writer Marie Dariussek Our Life in the Woods, produced in VR format.

Virtual productions of the Augsburg State Theater are receiving international attention

Swivel chairs are set up in a corner of the room for a 360-degree experience. Guests’ faces disappear behind bulky VR goggles and with oversized headsets, they appear as a mobile workforce from a bleak future that is decidedly out of date. It is now the eleventh production to be shown in virtual reality State TheatreAnd even if some homes in this country use the format as an alternative to closing phases related to the pandemic, the number of virtual reality productions is a unique selling point in Augsburg. Even before the lockdowns, the format was on Staatstheater’s schedule, and so virtual productions emanate Augsburg Now at the international level, director Andre Booker reports.

He directed the play after stumbled upon a review of the 2019 novel and realized that “this material is perfect for that format. Mary is an unreliable narrator, jumping back and forth between what she knows and only what she thinks.” Unlike previous productions, the set is built almost entirely, with small group runs in front of a green screen. In the roughly 20-minute excerpt that those present can see that evening, one first encounters protagonist Mary (Katja Seder) as a little bunny hidden under a gray blanket in the woods. His portrayal is interrupted again and again by brief turbulent moments that allow the complex circuit boards and neon-colored networks of cyberspace to flash. The boundaries between reality and the parallel world that is generated and controlled by computers become blurred.

In “Our Life in the Woods” people get implants

With every line that comes out of Marie’s mouth, you get an idea of ​​the cruel surveillance with which she fled into the woods. A dystopia is made up of small fragments that slowly paint a larger picture: Tsunami waves have submerged the islands of the world’s oceans, and people are implanted at birth and used on the arm and ear, which They have grown into tissues over the years and can only be removed by corresponding painful autologous operations. “They didn’t want people to disappear without knowing anything about it,” Mary says, “they would burn down the forest to build a tree garden in gridiron boxes with no more bushes.” headphones, but the suspense arc takes hold after a few scenes. The question of who “the” actually is will never be left behind, as will the question of whether we are really on our way to that bleak, misanthropic scenario that Mary is trying to escape from.

Dystopia works particularly well when it is made plausible in the not-too-distant future. If you look at the state of the world, surveillance technology and the desire for self-improvement, the portrayal of this totalitarian society of control has an impressive effect. Does the work of the people known as “clicks” (Thomas Prazak), who are supposed to teach robots empathy through chains of associations, drawing uncomfortable parallels with discussions of artificial intelligence? Isn’t the idea of ​​clones as a storehouse of spare parts an allegory for the hype of self-perfection thought through to the end? Aren’t the boundaries between man and machine becoming increasingly blurred? The plaster over Mary’s eye relentlessly reveals that she has taken on the role of an organ donor.

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The most impressive scene is from the ruler’s perspective. If you lower your head, Mary does a stare with her remaining eye and repeats this sentence over and over in a toneless voice desolate from all hope: “I am alone.” Virtual reality allows immersion in its world, which at this immediacy would not work on the classic theater. And that reverberates, even as the cooler home becomes a place to party again after stepping out of the virtual world.