ARCHIVES 2013 / Rausch

The title of the show that Falk Richter has co-signed with the choreographer Anouk van Dijk is programmatic. Rausch, however, is one of those German words with many meanings making it neatly untranslatable into another language. In the show, meaning “inebriation”, both on the stock market and in love, as well as “murmuring”, “Dionysian frenzy” or “mad sequence”. It nevertheless sets a course with the seven dancers and five actors who make up the international troupe of Rausch: abandoning the realm of rationality, colonized by neoliberal ideology and financial interests, and giving battle to recover hope. In this play, Falk Richter sketches the portrait of Western youth, who, at the moment of an omnipresent crisis, grow up with means of communication that offer new social and affective networks. It is no longer the moment to be afraid of change, but to imagine other forms of being together, by radically questioning our lifestyles and social organization. Whether they express themselves with their body or with the poetic and political words that Falk Richter puts in their mouth, the young characters of Rausch are looking for a grip on this world that now seems out of control and whose reference points are collapsing one after the other. Using the love relationship to explore the condition of their contemporaries, Anouk van Dijk and Falk Richter cast a personal and critical, but always humorous, glance at the capitalist system that has gone as far as infiltrating our personal life. In this stunning show, carried by Ben Frost's electric music, they show us the so very well-ordered management of our professional and private lives, but also the flip side: the loss of control, this inebriation that encourages us to invent, beyond language, an amorous and collective utopia. MS