Screening format: DigiBeta / Duration: 21 minutes /
Language: English speaking with german or french or italian subtitles
- The project
- Artists' statement
- Review by Axel Lapp
- Credits
- Stills
- Artists' info
- Download brochure
The play included a short scene referring to the My Lai massacre. If members of the audience refused to participate actively in what was happening on stage during this scene, the actors interrupted their performance - sometimes for as long as three hours, depending on the audience’s reaction. The group experimented with several variations of the scene.
Starting with photographs of the performance and the notes of Richard Schechner, the theorist of environmental theatre, we came up with a new version of the My Lai sequence. We worked with the statements of soldiers involved in the massacre, criminal investigation reports, and contemporary articles in the press. In the process, we developed a scenario that enabled us to translate the historical documents into a form suitable for the stage.
We aimed at representing an event of war without using any of the film industry’s spectacular devices. What means do we have, as ordinary citizens, to come to terms with an act of terror? We followed the trail of the Performance Group. Their attempt to create a platform for self-criticism within the context of a theatre performance motivated our dramatic intentions. For this we reconstructed the stage set of Commune: a wave, evoking a landscape and also functioning as an agora, and scaffolding around the stage with seating for the audience.
In 1971 the performers were inspired by rituals: they danced and they sang. We did not attempt to recreate this authenticity in our production. Although we do evoke the symbolic level of their representation, we chose to develop our play with the actors on two different levels. Each of the performers takes on a function, for example, as a reporter, but they can also intervene at any time in their own name. Thus, there is a constant back and forth between the actors and the characters they are representing. This method of dramatic framing enabled us to establish an analogy with film.
There is no live performance in Capitulation Project. The scene was filmed in about 30 sequences during two night shoots, with extras as a ‘fake’ audience. The distance from the performance that is created through the process of filming is comparable to our detachment from current political events.
We intentionally moved back a few steps in time. We evoked the massacre by means of a contemporaneous artistic form in order to demonstrate that the grasp of an event of war is tied to its medial transmission.
