The boards of this stage are the depleted landscapes of Lusatia, glaciers of the Himalayas littered by mountaineers, the levelled hilltops of the resource-rich Appalachians, the continent-sized plastic eddies of the world's oceans, the Dannenröder Forest and the Hambacher Forest. In the NGLT, used landscapes are replayed, unquestioned patterns of thought are examined differently, a bundle of discourses becomes the stage. The NGLT abolishes the separation of front stage and back stage, the artistic operations office is constituted by nettle jellyfish, leaf fungi and praying mantises.
The NGLT understands nature as post-nature. Landscapes without human influence, without the impact of civilisation, exist only as projections.
Based on the finding that all humans are complicit in the devastation and thus producers of the dramatic landscapes, the NGLT proposes a future attitude: Coming into activity beyond the nostalgic view of the past (species extinction) and the mourning of the lost future (posthumanism). It is about creating social and nature-related relations with differently applied means of the old theatre, about embedding oneself in contexts and landscapes. Recording vibrations and making them audible. Developing courses and choreographies. Understanding landscapes as forms of relationships.
The ensemble of the NGLT consists of plants, stones, humans and other animal species, of technology and landscape. Its actors are avant-gardists of upheaval: soil compactors, marsupials and aqua gardeners are just as welcome as polyps, living stones, swamp cypresses and mushrooms, amphibious humans, sulphur spores and mercury-drinking dragonflies. Everyone is invited to become part of the ensemble according to their abilities.
MANIFEST
for the New Great Landscape Theatre (NGLT).
We are in the midst of a man-made apocalypse. It is a permanent process and has long since begun. From this the NGLT draws its urgency and postulates in 2021:
Human inhabitants of dramatic landscapes are sometimes socially
disadvantaged, for example through poorly planned or poorly implemented structural change processes. In some cases, this leads to an increased incidence of discrimination. The NGLT rejects all
forms of group-based hostility.
The NGLT understands its failure as a precursor to the next project.
The NGLT propagates process trust. Punctual, decentralised manifestations make intermediate states visible. Individual performances crystallise as nodes of Durational Pieces, they are visits to the workshops in progress. The fetish of the completed work is finally buried.
The NGLT tests new theatrical languages. Its alphabet essentially consists of communications between animals, humans, plants and landscape. It propagates the bag, the juxtaposition, the mushrooming. The constellations of the new ensembles are more important than the theatrical gesture, relationships more important than virtuosity.
The NGLT understands the transitions between artistic reception and production as fluid. Performers of the New Ensemble become spectators and vice versa. Modes of reception are not only the distant senses of seeing and hearing, but also smelling, tasting and feeling. Social and nature-related co-existence and co-creation are essential forms of reception.
All manifestos of the NGLT are freely accessible and open source. Third parties are invited to read, modify, use and re-access them. All associated manifestos together make up a decentralised thought structure, one of the manifestations of the NGLT.
