First Performance May 23rd 2007 at Theaterhaus Gessnerallee Zurich.

Director, Writer and Stage Designer Lukas Bangerter

“There are computers and desks now, where previously maybe a heron circled around a few times a year. Now, phones are answered and transactions are being closed, but there used to be nothing here."

The starting point for the project WALK DON’T WALK is the city as a system. The rapid urbanisation of humanity serves as one of the mega-trends of the 21st century. According to a report of the United Nations, the majority of people will live in cities for the first time in history in 2007. PLASMA takes a poetic look at this phenomenon and mentally carries the trend to its extreme: the borders of the mega-cities have started overlapping. The world is a city. Global City.

The PLASMA ensemble has been expanded extensively for the current production, with the two accomplished actresses, Hagar Admoni-Schipper from Israel and Helene Hoem from Denmark joining the ensemble as it existed to date. Janet Haufler from Bern, celebrated for her performance in RANDOM (PLASMA-Project 9), as well as the performance artist Norbert Klassen (also from Bern) have also re-joined the company.

The music for this PLASMA piece will be structured by the multi-instrumentalist Jan Ratschko and the laptop-musician Martin Wigger, in the same way as the signals “WALK" and "DON'T WALK" structure the New York stream of pedestrians.

For WALK DON’T WALK, Lukas Bangerter floods the theatre in a sea of buildings. He builds a cityscape that extends across the entire stage, sends his actors and musicians into a labyrinth of urban canyons and invites the audience to a nightly sightseeing flight around the metropolis, the mother of all cities. Like scientists studying ants, we start off by scrutinizing the system from the outside, and are then gradually drawn into and absorbed into it more and more.

PLASMA interprets the city as a social sculpture, as a collective memory, which is an expression of the needs and desires of the human beings who had planned, built and populated it. The city that man lives in is malleable, just like the human brain. It constantly changes, remembers and forgets. Both the brain and the city are highly complex systems and the result of a process of development, which fundamentally bases on the principle of self-organisation. Both are organised de-centrally and exist of a number of components that are closely interlinked with one another, and which interact with one another in a highly dynamic manner. We have structured the world around us to correspond to the world inside of us. PLASMA shows the city as the image of its creator, as the expression of the relationships between the inhabitants turned to stone.

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This project is made possible by:

  • Abteilung Kulturelles der Stadt Bern,
  • Amt für Kultur des Kantons Bern / SWISSLOS,
  • Burgergemeinde Bern,
  • Ernst Göhner Stiftung,
  • Ernst und Olga Gubler-Hablützel Stiftung,
  • Fondation Nestlé pour l’art,
  • Hamasil-Stiftung,
  • Kanton Zürich Fachstelle Kultur,
  • Migros Kulturprozent,
  • Schweizer Kulturstiftung Pro Helvetia,
  • Schweizerische Interpretenstiftung,
  • Sophie und Karl Binding Stiftung

Press:

Die Gruppe PLASMA spürt in "WALK DON'T WALK" dem Phänomen Stadt nach, leicht und assoziationsreich. Texter, Bühnenbildner und Regisseur Lukas Bangerter bringt komplexe Themen mit viel Humor und Leichtigkeit auf die Bühne. Die kurzen Szenen sind so rasch geschnitten, dass doch ein vielseitiges kaleidoskopisches Gesamtbild entsteht. "Ich habe die Stadt nicht gemacht, aber die Stadt macht mich" bringt eine der namenlosen Figuren am Ende des Stücks den Inhalt auf den Punkt.

BlickKultur

Weiterführende Information

Technical Rider