Exit Through the Backstage
The backstage is in shambles, the show is almost ready to start. Three technicians maladroitly mess about at the cables and trunks behind the scenery. Some loiter, some work hard, while others prefer to scrape by rather than give up. This, and much more, is Teatro Delusio.
Probably one of the most famous companies invited for this year’s Festival Dimitria, Familie Flöz, international non-spoken theatre company born in 1994, successfully merges dance, clownerie, acrobatics and magic in a show where the incomparable improv skills of its performers go hand in hand with their astounding masks. Theoretically, masks should provide fixity to the character, a stable and recognizable feature behind which the actor/ress can rest its weary face, letting the immovable expression do the deed. In Teatro Delusio, however, masks are naught but the starting point for dynamic revolutions, oneiric deviations and psychological pockets where the human soul silently hides. The result is a 15 years-old play that is still capable of jerking a tear and a laugh with the same movement of the hands.
The hands, the incarnation of the art of saying everything without a single world. The backstage, the theatre behind the theatre. The technicians, the bedlam of faceless professionals who make the world go round and round. Three actors for thirty characters, each with its complex and well-defined personality. In Teatro Delusio, everything is false, but nothing is fake. Anyone who has ever worked in a theatre will find him/herself reflected in one of these histrionic masks. All the world’s a backstage, as someone would never say: flaws, phobias, manias, flatteries, jests, affections, jealousy, envy, vanity and snares – the whole range of human desires and ambitions criss-cross the scene. Nothing is more real than these masks, more lively than the embalmed mommies and walking corpses that so often populate the stage.
Familie Flöz gives life to a meta-theatrical delusion that is poetic and innovative, atavistic and experiential, physical and magical at the same time. An hymn to transformism, a fair of music, colours and costumes. A show that very well deserves the double applause of the audience, both the real one and the one behind the backstage.
The show was played at
Labattoir
26th October Street 35 – Thessaloniki
Wednesday 16 October
21.00the Dimitria Festival presents
Teatro Delusio
by Familie Flözdirection Michael Vogel
masks Hajo Schüler
created by Paco González, Björn Leese, Hajo Schüler, Michael Vogel
with Andrès Angulo, Dana Schmidt, Björn Leese,
and with Johannes Stubenvoll, Daniel Matheus, Michael Vogel, Thomas van Ouwerker, Sebastian Kautz, Hajo Schüler
set design Michael Vogel
costumes Eliseu R. Weide
sound design Dirk Schröder
light design Reinhard Hubert
sound technicians Florian Mönks, Thomas Wacker
lightning technicians Sylvain Faye, Max Rux
graphics Silke Meyer
