unkaputtbar
idea: Peter Schelling direction and dramaturgy: Béatrice Jaccard choreography and performance: Massimo Bertinelli, Thomas Maucher, Michael Rüegg, Peter Schelling music: François Gendre et Massimo Bertinelli set design: Peter Schelling light design: François Gendre costumes: Daphné Ineichen production management: Beatrice Rossi
first night performance 2005 October 26th Espace Nuithonie
a co-production of compagnie drift with Espace Nuithonie, Villars-sur-Glâne
performances: Nuithonie, Fribourg (CH), Theater an der Sihl, Zurich (CH), 9th European Dance Festival, Limassol (CY), « La Bâtie » Festival de Genève – Château Rouge, Annemasse (F), Tanztage Basel – Roxy, Basle (CH), Intern. Mime Square Festival, Aarschot (B), Théâtre la Fourmi, Lucerne (CH), Annual Intern. Presentation of Contemporary Dance Forms, Kalisz (PL), Silesian Dance Theatre, Bytom (PL), Tanztage Dresden – Festspielhaus Hellerau (D), New Baltic Dance ’07, Vilnius (LT),Romaeuropa – Teatro Palladium, Roma (I), 24th Dance Week Festival, Zagreb (HR), World Performing Arts Festival, Lahore (Pakistan), MU Theatre, Budapest (H), Gomhoreya Theatre, Cairo (Egypt)
with the support of Präsidialdepartement of the City of Zurich, Pro Helvetia – Arts Council of Switzerland, Canton de Fribourg – Encouragement à la culture, Fachstelle Kultur Kanton Zürich, Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation, Zuger Kulturstiftung Landis & Gyr, Kulturstiftung Winterthur, Familien-Vontobel-Stiftung, Dr. Adolf Streuli-Stiftung, Stiftung der Schweizerischen Landesausstellung 1939, Schweizerische Interpreten-Stiftung, Migros Kulturprozent
A dance production with four men who pursue crooked ways while travelling together on the wrong track. Imperturbably they always fall on their feet – more or less – and they never give up.
They keep up a sturdy and friendly camaraderie amongst themselves that here and there degenerates into unfriendly scuffles.
They construct pyramids as structures of ideas and coax their friends into allowing themselves to be used as building blocks. They love building too high and become masters in crashing down.
During their falls they always hope to be able to learn to fly. At the same time they are relieved to realize that the law of gravity still operates.
The world is in the eyes of these men so full of deception that they have to use all of their wits to survive in it. They are never quite sure whether their perceptions are distorted by trickery. Therefore they take shelter in compiling and inventing complex rules and regulations, thus concealing reality within a jungle-like matrix that presses it into a bizarre framework.
They pronounce absurd ways in which to solve problems as rational. They tap each other on the shoulder, to prove that the shoulder still exists. In this way the men keep to their course and decide to see their world as beautiful because if the world were ugly, their lives would be stale.
In their happiest dreams they are mountaineers or polar explorers; useless heroes exploring the darkest caves, deepest oceans and desert snows. But whether or not they would have become so, the world would still be unchanged. In spite of their extreme effort and the resulting frozen fingers the last messages they would leave to the world outside and to posterity would arouse no particular interest.
Perhaps when on the mountain peaks they would look for new continents. Instead, failing in that radically futile search, they would find their own unchanging inner selves. They would enjoy life and settle contentedly in their newly tested homemade reality.
Press excerpts
Insatiable love-hate relationship
“...Happy the theatre, on whom Cie Drift unexpectedly drops in....(the dancers) like poor clowns from the plays of Beckett, are fragmentary existences, who mutually tear their joints apart, as if they were only wet rags....in an untiring love-hate relationship with themselves and with the four inflated air cushions, the performers, in admirable top form, poke fun at the role of men. Ironic, well-constructed, absurd. With drift, a Pas de deux never appears weightless, but ‘tough’. In a very elegant way tough. Just as “unkaputtbar” – unwreckable – implies....” baz, Basel 22.9.06
Dancing demonstration of manpower
“...an entertaining production full of witty ideas and acrobatic intermezzos, with an imaginative stage set and an ingenious sound design, and above all with masculine power shown in dance and divining abysmal insights....” bz, Basle, 21st September 2006
The princes and the pea
„...four stolid men, who, however are sensitive to the presence of a pea, even if it were concealed under several layers of mattresses.… it is a group almost representative of the lords of creation, who in “Indestructible” make sundry attempts to use their strength and courage in order to assume perfection.
…a subtle touch of comedy runs throughout the production. But the humour does not consist in ridiculing stereotypical masculine behaviour, but rather in subtle movement, with only a hint of clichéd gestures, thereby helping to communicate the feeling of insecurity and the possibility of failure already existing in the mise en scène.
…. with the unchanging satisfied expression of winners they keep on performing their party-pieces, only to fall to the ground over and over again… A compact and atmospheric production full of surprises.’
Those headstrong heroes performing handstands, those energetic princes, those nimble ‘never-say-die’ chaps and clown-like cowboys are in the end simply nothing more than artists in the circus of life…” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zurich, 24th November 2005
Getting on with it, while burying one’s head in the sand simultaneously’
„...a profound, intense and funny production…”
…Four dancers, four strange birds begin the evening by rocking up and down on inflatable, transparent mattresses, moving onward in a semi-lascivious manner, half absent-mindedly and at the same time hypnotizing their audience.
..Each of them considers with utmost seriousness the condition of the ordinary man, dreaming of his own invincibility.…A feeling of the absurd becomes apparent in their actions and Sisyphus is never far away. ….Theatrical scenes transform themselves into intensive sequences of motion…in a hilarious and witty manner they show how people struggle with their own humanity...
….They move forward, cost what it may, trying to keep control.…They aim to convince everybody of their superiority, while trying to remain calm, even while they lose their dignity as they lose their balance.
They are convinced, beyond all doubt, that they are exceptional acrobats, even though the effect they produce verges on the ridiculous. And they keep on screaming their incomprehensible words, unaware of the fact that the ground under their feet is opening up. But they also make desperate and awkward attempts to understand their fellows with whom they want to relate more intimately.”
La Liberté, Fribourg, Switzerland 28th October 2005
Men’s dreams from the feminine perspective
‚...a playful and intelligent commentary on the traditional images of masculinity….
…threateningly wobbling mattresses are climbed just like a snow-covered mountain top. Close to a yawning abyss the last happy group photo is taken with a delayed-action shutter, just before everything falls, burying the courageous team. That they show neither fright nor pain, but climb up again, as if nothing had happened, ready to face the next challenge, is a point of honour for them…’
Tages-Anzeiger, Zurich, 24th November 2005
Unshakeable optimists
„The Dance Company Drift in top condition.
‚Indestructible’...has humour and much double meaning...
...They keep on making as if to accomplish extravagant deeds, anxious to experience every possibility. They are completely absorbed in their endeavours, until the point where they once again fall flat on their faces but, in a very real sense, they all fall on their feet…. they just keep on going with undiminished energy and with great seriousness…
...This performance...counters all that is depressed, dejected and exhausted with its inexhaustible life energy….
A continuously precise structure as well as a superior rhythmical scheme frame the clown-like grotesqueness and the athletic-acrobatics in a very special aspect of dance...“
Der Landbote, Zürichsee-Zeitungen, Zurich 24th November 2005
Pretty much Drift
„...Sometimes appearing as clowns, sometimes as four madmen, but always human, all too human: the quartet reminds us of tragic-comic characters like Wladimir and Estragon in “Waiting for Godot”, but also of the ordinary modern man in the street, who fights to understand the meaning of life, while sometimes sitting forlorn in a classy bar.
...Onomatopoeic cursing and violent argument goes on. Movements threaten, gestures punctuate….”
Tanz der Dinge, December 2005/January 2006, Switzerland