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  • Kein Weltuntergang: Feedback loop exemplified

Stage

Kein Weltuntergang: Feedback loop exemplified

What should we do about climate change? Kein Weltuntergang at Schaubühne puts that question to an audience.

Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz Berlin
Gianmarco Bresadola

What should we do about climate change?  Kein Weltuntergang at Schaubühne puts that question to an audience. Photo: Gianmarco Bresadola | Schaubühne

Three women open three doors and enter the space, flanked by two more women riding stationary bicycles. Not a fitness club but the play’s light and sound power source. We hear time rewind, three women exit, enter again, one moving slowly, two fast. Reverse. Enter again. Repeat. A post-doc climate science job interview starts, is interrupted, begins again, but some details have changed.

It keeps happening, creating multiple timelines, multiple variations on a story with each restart. With no linear narrative but fragments of a hundred possible ones, perspectives keep changing in small increments throughout the play. Only the slower-moving woman in the centre carrying an urn of ashes, gradually filling the space with plants, is more constant. Like Lorenz’s chaos theory proposition that the flap of a butterfly wing can eventually cause a tornado, small changes make a difference. It’s also about Timothy Morten’s ‘hyper-objects’, about climate change.

What should we do? Something? Nothing? Exit, enter. Start again. It’s exhausting: so is climate change. It’s not exhausting, but it’s super smart direction, an excoriating rendition of Chris Bush’s play, hard to imagine it done any other way. It’s uncomfortable and challenging, like climate change. We can do something, we want to do something, but we don’t do anything, or we do one small thing. Someone here has done something. And what about that urn of ashes? Someone has died. What happened? In the audience, you’re invited to search for causes and effects and construct your own narrative. Go! While you still can.

Sep 27, & 29 (at FIND, followed by a post-show talk) with English surtitles