IN THE CORPSE OF THE PRESENT Prince Friedrich of Homburg Heinrich von Kleist

Marco Fusinato's IN THE CORPSE OF THE PRESENT is spread over two levels of Gorky and can be seen for eight hours on 21 days. The work features both the former theatre foyer, which becomes a stage on the ground floor, and the large hall on the first floor. Both spaces are active at the same time and invite the audience to move freely between them and to experience the work from different perspectives and over different periods of time.

Three starting materials form the basis for Fusinato's adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's Prince Friedrich of Homburg:

In a yellow Reclam edition of the play, all lines that are not spoken by the prince have been crossed out, leaving the prince alone in the remnants of his text. The second source material is a recording of Peter Stein's legendary production at the Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer from 1972. The third is a forgotten Kleist monument in the courtyard of a Berlin school. His face was scanned and reproduced as a mask for the performers.

On the ground floor, in Gorky's former foyer, the performers are constantly moving these materials. Through their actions, literature is transformed into vibration and theatre slides into ritual. They turn the records by hand at extremely slow speeds and stretch speech into throaty sound, long-lasting sound surfaces and fragmented, hard noise. With Kleist's face in front of their own and the prince's isolated words, they move between embodiment and disappearance. No single person assumes the role of prince; rather, they migrate from body to body, repeatedly eluding a fixed identity.

In the large hall, Fusinato plays extensive improvisation on the electric guitar, accompanied by a continuous sequence of video material. Assembled from various sources, the moving images unfold alongside the overwhelmingly amplified sound and create a contemporary visual world of spectacle, collapse, transmission and interruption.

The two levels give the central division in Kleist's Prince a spatial form. On the ground floor, we return again and again to language, discipline and representation, while the theatre above opens up for improvisation, collision and excess. Like two states of consciousness that exist simultaneously, neither resolves the other. Without a predetermined beginning, a fixed sequence or a single perspective, IN THE CORPSE OF THE PRESENT is revealed through movement, duration and proximity. Each visitor consists of these elements in their own encounter with work.