Instant Feedback by Frank Schmid / Sergiu Matis: Hopeless.

Production Details / Press Releases

Pastoral poetry from Greek and Roman antiquity is at the base of Sergiu Matis’s performance “Hopeless.” In an unceasingly warming world, what is left of the idyllic, cultivated nature described in the poems of Theocritus and Virgil? Are the poets perhaps themselves responsible for setting it on fire with their trivial erotic turbulence, and their politicising of landscape? In “Hopeless.”, we forge our own pastoral settings out of shreds, fragments and remains, like data from a library of sounds of extinct animals, or old and new translations of the Idylls. A desperate act of putting back together, or franticly trying to conserve what’s left, all the while mourning the losses yet to come. A general sensation of powerlessness transforms us into spectators at a festival of catastrophes and ruination.

The performers in “Hopeless.” are technologically enhanced mermaids, nymphs and shepherds that desperately compete to see who can make the audience cry the loudest. The ecology between poetic language and choreography enables words to collide woefully with flesh, and vocal cords to give the tone to motion so that we can shout out loudly, and exorcise all possible dystopian scenarios. Hopelessness is not a state of a paralysis, but a powerful force that moves us to act.

[Source: play bill]

TFB Nr. 1287

Cast & Credits

Concept, choreography: Sergiu Matis
Performance: Martin Hansen, Sergiu Matis, Manon Parent
Text: Sergiu Matis, Mila Pavicevic, based on translations of Theocritus and Virgil
Sound design: AGF aka Antye Greie
Dramaturgy: Mila Pavicevic
Set design: Dan Lancea
Costume: Philip Ingman
Light design: Sandra Blatterer
Choreographic assistance: Orlando Rodriguez
Production management: Dag Lohde

Translations of Theocritus and Virgil from: Hine, Daryl (trans.), 1982, Theocritus: Idylls and Epigrams, New York: Atheneum; and Holzberg, Niklas (ed. and trans.), 2016, ‘Bucolica / Hirtengedichte’ in Bucolica, Georgica / Hirtengedichte, Landwirtschaft, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 42–50.
Animal sounds courtesy of the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Xeno-canto Foundation, and the following recordists: Patrik Åberg, Arthur A. Allen, Desmond Allen, Nick Athanas, Ian Atkinson, Mark Barsamian, Hanom Bashari, Arnoud van den Berg, Caio Brito, Warren Brockelman, Rhys Buckingham, Timothy Burr, Stijn Cooleman, Ronald Crombie, John Dennis, George Drewry, William Duellman, Amy Dunham, Stephen Edwards, Victor Emanuel, Johannes Fischer, John Fitzpatrick, J. Richard Gauthey, William Gunn, Pieter de Groot Boersma, Kim Howell, Panchapakesan Jeganathan, Gareth K., G. Stuart Keith, Peter Paul Kellogg, Ben King, Jon King, Daniel Lane, Linda Macaulay, Yann Muzika, Markus Nolf, John O’Neill, Michael Ord, Theodore Parker III, Erik Patel, Eduardo Patrial, H. Douglas Pratt, Thane Pratt, A. Stanley Rand, Ronald Sauey, Robert Shallenberger, Roney Souza, Robert Stein, Charles Sutherland, Philippe Verbelen, Jean Ward, William Ward, Bret Whitney, Lucienne Wilmé, and C. Fred Zeillemaker.

A Sergiu Matis production.
Funded by the Capital Cultural Fund, the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, coproduced by Tanzfabrik Berlin in the frame of Open Spaces! in cooperation with Radialsystem.
With the kind support of Sasha Waltz & Guests.

Radialsystem

Holzmarkstraße 33
10243 Berlin

radialsystem.de
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Tickets: (030) 288 788 588

Tanzforum Berlin