Feel like getting swept up in a visual and conceptual vortex? One that fully grabs your attention and makes everything else seem to vanish? Then go to the Volksbühne to see “Jessica – An Incarnation” by director Susanne Kennedy. The work poses some crucial questions about the meaning of life and left me completely under its spell: what is fiction, what is reality and in which reality am I in right now? Right from the start, an impressive, illuminated space opens up, populated with abstract, weathered sculptures, which – just like the actors on stage – repeatedly move into view on the rotating stage, reminiscent of a stylized desert. Through the pulsating rhythm and fragmented light, it feels as if the scenes are being observed through a kaleidoscope.
In a central moment of the work, the protagonist Jessica, like a female Jesus in fine ribbed underwear, addresses her disciples. The themes of the dialogue also rotate and loop; much of it revolves around death and resurrection, peppered with Christian allusions and always revolving around the question of what’s reality and what is perhaps imagination. But that’s not all: in the midst of this overarching theme there are also temporal leaps into a futuristic world. Here we are told about the invention “anamnesis”, through whose technology people can review their subconscious experiences in fast forward as if in a tunnel, near-death experience. As the audience simply surrenders to this storm between spirituality and hyper-realistic scenes, we go on a pulsating, two-hour-long journey that’s a visually stunning spectacle. At some point, it doesn’t seem to matter where the narrative began and where it will end, and when the performance is suddenly over after all, I staggered out of the theater to be caught up with reality again far too quickly.
Text: Nicola Sifrin / Photos: Julian Röder
Jessica – An Incarnation at the Volksbühne, Linienstr.227, 10178 Berlin–Mitte; map
Until 30.04.2022. You can buy tickets online.
@volksbuehne_berlin
