The play begins with the victory fantasies of the Persians. These of course are meant to help them stifle their fear of defeat. The evocations are spoken bit by bit by an actress, unseen. They echo through the room while the audience looks into a wide, empty space.

The second stage is a discursive inquiry regarding the humanistic interpretive tradition of "The Persians". Could it have been enjoyable to experience a lamenting world power on stage? The actress, now mingling with the audience, shows through the historical facts that the gruesomely detailed war reporting in the messenger's account less likely focused on any sympathy with the vanquished (as is often claimed) than on a collective celebration of this Greek "David-victory" over the Persian "Goliath".¹

In part three, the actress takes on the role of the vanquished. Expressing the horror becomes an act of mourning. The voice carefully touches on the words. A lengthy listening follows each lamentation. Intimacy in tone and time-space is linked in such a way that the ancient words of lamentation seem near and far alike. The red square is the focus of this event.

In the fourth part, this space, where till now no acting has taken place, is revealed to the audience as a time-space for their reflections, their memories or their actions. In the last stage, all congregate where the red square was. They sit at tables, eat chocolate (symbolic for a funeral party) and relate to each other as well as to newly arrived guests what happened here.

"All of Dante's expressiveness is held together by a phonetic construction: an infinitely variable rhythmic pulse adaptable to anything he wanted to convey. The rhythm always moves forward. Each moment is dancing and the dance never stops."¹ Through the objectivity of the structure, everything is treated equally: amusing details (and Dante loves details) and theological maxims, political struggles and some trivial unpleasantries, harrowing agony and the height of spiritual experience, everything beats to the same rhythm. It is this unique way of reflecting on the world that determines the performance motive: waiving all interpretation, the speaker allows all events and verbal images to come to life, a rhythmic lapping of waves which allows for an affective physical experiencing of the tale.²

The prose rhythm of Hartmut Köhler's impressive German translation allows for a light accentuation. The listener is invited, step after step, to follow the pursuit. After each tercet (three verses) there is a brief pause. A hearkening, an inner vision is possible. The Commedia fulfills its purpose when the listener too becomes a wanderer. 

Each canto is framed by a short introduction and a few lines from the original Italian version.

The text reads like a log book for wartime brainwashing. It's subject is explicitly the power words have over us.² What to do with those formulas? I am neither interested in repeating the story of the struggle for annihilation through fiction nor showing characters who are consistent. Preferably, a field of tension should develop that evokes the indoctrination and imperatives of an effective textual legacy while simultaneously removing any possible identification, thus allowing the language of violence to crumble. I choose a speech methodology which allows abstraction and figuration to merge.

A two-room installation was set up for the presentation. The actress is sitting alone in a small chamber; the audience can look into that room through a door but not enter it. In the visitors' room, a video projection shows the face of the artist growing more and more blurred. In the space of an hour, the actress has gone deep into her own physical experience of language, experimenting verbally with this cruel and yet so poetic glorification of violence. For brief moments, you can discern the characters behind the rearing verbal cascades and the slogans of destruction. Through this verbal show a play about war is presented in which no one is performing anymore.

Visitors are allowed to change seats. Different angles offer different options in the combination of visual and acoustic information.

The performance can be seen in the context of my occupation over many years with oral traditions in the African cultural sphere. I don't mean by that oral traditions of tales and sagas but rather a comprehensive concept of language as a "principle of action".⁴ This idea results in a dynamic concept with respect to the relationship between a written text and its performance. I address this in a cycle of presentation: concretizing speech in a written form (demonstrated through a video projection), and thus interlocking the opulence of variety when texts are rendered orally. Consequently, the venue for the production (Haus der Kunst), itself steeped in history, is transformed into a visual medium and – thanks to its tremendous echo – also into a sounding box for a political outcry: "Europe patrols my veins like a swarm of filariae at the stroke of midnight."⁵

The performers (a European woman and an African man) arrive daily at 13:13 hours (symbolic of another way of perceiving time) und deliver "poetic news". The poetry of Césaire is an invitation to a dialogue with the world of diversity. Technical language from geology and botany, Latin words and his own invented words provide an insight into a complex image of the world and are likewise a space for Césaire's painfully explosive descriptions of his own historical experience.

Each day, the performers explore afresh the messages in the poetry. All at once, viewers are confronted with the concrete situation of the black African performer living in Europe who plays with their expectations and asks all at once: "Do you want me to dance for you?"

Together with the Japanese pianist Masako Ohta, I turned the laws of music improvisation into text vocalization. There are no clear rules about how the text should sound. Instead, the performers get into the text in a fresh way for each performance and convey the resulting impulses immediately as voice and sound production:

"A towel / a Turk wears it on her head / the wind takes it up / and lays it on the belly of the cross /a linen towel / when it's dark at the movies / the towel steps down from the cross / and flies into the kitchen / and dries."¹

The speaker and the pianist are infected by this poetically bizarre scenario: the speaker sticks to the text stubbornly, takes risks though by stretching sounds, changing tempos and voice frequency, even allowing for repetitions. Sometimes you first hear vocal noises and phonemes alone which then unfold into words or sentences. The pianist reacts to the text via rhythm, melody fragments, noises. Together they create a meaning-sound-fabric where statements are transmogrified, sounds and words affecting each other and a continually oscillating space for perception and meaning is created. In short: A world comes into view where dream and reality cannot be separated.

Four women of various ages and from the three provinces of theater, acting, dance and song, confront the text as a field of experience. They pursue the associative narrative styles inherent in the poems through speech, movement and song fragments. They forge a childlike connection to nature in cascades of words:

"Let all be neckwards, be heaven- WHOOSH, wish and"¹

The dancer feels these experiences in body movement; and the composer Sidney Corbett has created a pitch for a mezzosoprano, weaving ephemeral tones and fearful inklings into the process of memory.

The visual artist Anne Wodtcke has set up the stage with sculptural elements: plants, wood, slanting levels, a giant mountain of crumbled paper. The sober reflections of the narrator serve as a contrast to the sensual submersion into the world of memory. She asks: "What have you seen?'' The word "suicide" is never used and is nevertheless all-present. Forgoing an unambiguous story enables the audience to discover its own traces and experiences in this poetic tale.

Two customs rooted in almost all cultures are combined in a single public space: the celebration of a ritual text and drinking tea with others. In accordance with their own local customs, people from an intercultural neighborhood serve tea. A time schedule is posted indicating when each tea ceremony will take place. The venue for the performance was in the Maxvorstadt area of Munich, and tea was served from places like Mongolia, Ethiopia, Russia, Japan, Turkey – but likewise English breakfast tea and Bavarian mint-lemon balm tea.

Every 15 minutes a gong sounds and one of the twenty-eight lines from Ecclesiastes is intoned by a voice and instrument combination, as an improvisation of around two minutes. Then more tea is served. People talk or remain silent. Participants may come and go or return. The language of the performance is English. Other languages are also possible.

12 hours: There is a time to be born. 12:15 hours: And a time to die. 12:30 hours: A time for planting. 12:45 hours: And a time for uprooting what has been planted [...] 16:00 hours: A time for searching. 16:15 hours: And a time for losing [...] 19:45 hours: There is a time for war. 20:00 hours: And a time for peace.

Together with an interdisciplinary ensemble I created a scenario for this text in which the struggle against rulership is performed as a striving for subjective expression. Line for line the performers break through the contingent of verbal forms of expression sanctioned by a society and rebel against the intrinsic (re)production of the structures. By merging body movement and musical elements, we experiment with parameters that have not been turned into clichés. Lines are sung, stuttered, celebrated, fragmented into phonemes etc. A momentum evolves through the individuality of the performers and finally converges into a fabric of divergent artistic articulations. 

Simultaneously, these individual struggles for freedom constitute a new collective power. Whatever an individual produces is repeated in chorus.

The entirety is organized as an action loop in a special installation constructed on several levels for the audience to enter into.