MEDIATHEK

A journey through Surrealism and silent film, Exposure Berlin is a musical excursion through 1920’s French surrealist theater, and German expressionist silent film. It blurs the lines between reality and a dreamworld of nightmarish distortions. The piece questions the danger of physically stepping out of the skin, venturing beyond social constraints, in a backdrop overshadowed by the tension between conformity and jeopardy in the time of the impending Second World War.

Through the theatrical synthesis of film and an orchestra both avant-garde and operatic, Exposure Berlin revives the long abandoned Delphi Theater to its historic glory of the 1920’s. This once-popular spot has been closed to the general public since 1959, and with this show Berlin has the opportunity to enjoy the magical space again.

We are welcomed into the bedazzled realm of 1920’s splendor by two ushers and the lovely opera singer Paris, performing a cabaret style number. Then, a siren screams: a bomb that sends us not to our death but abruptly spirals us into a surrealist dream in which a woman from the audience becomes a man and her husband gives birth to 40,049 babies - his own army. The “Husband” is drunk with the power of being “creator”. But what does such radical “emancipation” beyond norms lead to? Dissecting the answer only leads to madness. Our once entrusted guides into the Roaring Twenties, the ushers, are now mute prisoners, stuck inside a silent film. The fleeting phantom of the Delphi Theater resurfaces with opera arias of riddling advice, condemnation and a genderless form that fuels the struggle to make sense of a senseless world.

Exposure Berlin is based on Les Mamelles de Tirésias, a 1917 play by G. Apollinaire for which the playwright first created the word “surrealist”, to describe radical and theatrical distortion. Inspiration for Exposure Berlin is vested in Apollinaire’s vision to stir cultural preconceptions of gender and conformity. The surrealist performance catapults the audience into the tension between empowerment through selfdetermination and the powerlessness of socio-cultural “reality”.
The disruptive switch of language throughout the performance is a surrealist means to question understanding and communication itself.

This multimedia production is the manifestation of two years of creative collaboration and immersed study of surrealism and expressionism, to create new forms as a means to rattle contemporary preconception which still resonates.