Do you sometimes feel as if a veil is separating you from your surroundings? A veil you’d like to lift? Do you feel more and more like you’re being watched? Are you ticklish?
Have you been wondering for a while what eating light is all about? Do you suddenly miss your parents from time to time? Do you love photos more than anything? Do you have a laugh that isn’t contagious?
In Blind Variation #3 we set out on a search for truth. The starting point is Friedrich Schiller’s ballad, “The Veiled Statue at Sais,” which couples the ancient topos of the same name and a hungry young man’s search for knowledge. As Schiller writes: “It is only one for all, but everyone sees it differently. That one thing remains true makes the differences true.”
The audience plays through the evening in small groups, solving puzzles as they work their way through the story. In the process, three ways of life become three sides of the same coin, three truth seekers grab the audience by three hands. Three spaces come together, three utopias collide, and a veil remains a veil.
A theater game for 12 players. Duration: approximately 50 minutes.
Premiere / Venues
Premiere in June 2013 at the Nationaltheater Mannheim
Credit: Christian Kleiner
Based on Schiller’s ballad ‘The Veiled Statue at Sais,’ these young media and theater tricksters have created a play whose form not only captures the major theme of the Schiller Festival (“The Critical Mass”) in a clear call for personal accountability and self-empowerment, but also reopens the Romantic discourse on the nature of truth. Schiller’s epigram “It is one for all, but everyone sees it differently; that one thing remains true makes the differences true” is what drives the production, which, despite all its playfulness, still raises fundamental questions. And doesn’t make it too easy to answer them.
Bernd Mand, nachtkritik.de
By: Anan Fries, Yves Regenass, Laura Schäffer, Philip Steimel (machina eX) /// Text: Olivia Wenzel /// Sound: Malu Peeters /// Staging and Costumes Anan Fries, Marie Luise Schlegelmilch /// Production: Laura Schäffer /// Technical Direction: Philip Steimel /// Performance Direction: Anan Fries, Yves Regenass /// Performance: Janina Schröder; Florian Stamm, Dominik Weber
A production commissioned by the Nationaltheater Mannheim for the 17th International Days of Schiller, in co-production with machina eX and zeitraumexit e.V.