DESIGN AND PERFORMED BY max van
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Mission Statement
Faust is called the poem of modernity, recalled David E.Wellbery who wrote the introduction to Goethe’s Faust (2014). The pursuit of modernity is a prevalent phenomenon now as any time we have seen Faust resurface in the theater scene. Modernity embodies the system of capitalism and imperialism. Modernity ruptures the idea of a home, of life, of a self, of an experience. It saturates and speeds up how we create and experience the world. Wellbery also notes that in modernity, we depend on instruments that we have not mastered. Before we can comprehend our finite destruction, modernity already pushes us to the next unknown. Every creation is destruction. Nothing can satisfy the demand of modernity. As Faust so clearly embodies, we are free beings fettered to our own finitude, making humans the happiest and unhappiest creatures on Earth. We operate in a world of irony and contradictions.
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In this project, I am led by boundaries of modernity, finitude, and time. Using a post-dramatic approach, I collected my personal memory and our collective history of the Syrian war. The war in Syria pushed Europe to externalize its borders and abandon its moral foundation. By cutting deals with Turkey and countries where refugees are coming from, Europe established those countries as its “waiting room” with little regard for the people left behind in cages. Who am I as a participant in this wager? Using modern phones, my memories are archived; my live recording and replay are as fast as our access to information and knowledge. Like how photography changed our limits, our phones collapse linearity – changing how we document war, tragedy, and access to other truths – creating openings for contradictions. Thus, this device is changing the form of documentary.
As for the textual content, Marshal Berman notes, that Faust’s early strive beyond the finitude of the material world embodies his first metamorphosis, The Dreamer. The relationship between text and visual is built on Faust’s two souls in tension. First, the chosen text is one that “grips the earth with all its sense.” Juxtaposing the second, the chosen visual is one that “struggles from the dust to rise to high ancestral spheres.” This brings me to Expressionism, incorporating spirituality and movement through our senses (lighting, sound, smell, sensation) – no division between the body and mind.
In the end, I am left with a draft. As Goethe writes “What’s left undone today, is still not done tomorrow”, my work is not done. Maybe it will be another 60 years till it is complete.
HIGHLIGHTS
