– by Ines Ortner
The concept for Hamletmachine is the loss of purpose for Humanity in the relentless repetition of Europe’s history defined by wars. I am interested in exploring the idea that neither rational nor emotional Human Beings seem to be capable to change a predestined outcome, therefore ending the story where it has started. The play resembles the movement of a humungous machine, loud, repetitive, endless, relentless, powerful and unstoppable, boring, yet captivating. The protagonists are portrayed in the furthest state of the economic concept of progression that occurs through them not living in the machine age anymore — they are the machine itself.
In Hamletmachine I want to visually reflect this post-apocalyptic nightmare by focusing on these memory fragments and reflections that exist to recognize them in order to repeat them, not to change them.
This results in the governing structures and wars that have been fought over them [memory fragments and reflections] turning the history of progression against itself and therefore against Ophelia, Hamlet and Gertrud, until reproduction is the mere creation of copies, repetition is obsession and freedom just another word for confinement.
I see a partially mechanized human form in an unresolved relationship between “the Trapped” (the man made, the machine) but also “the Initiator” (the born organism, also a mechanism), which creates a tension that is visualized in the costumes through Beauty-by-Impairment, disabling the wearer’s movement to different degrees which is the starting point not just of character development but the stylized visualization of Heiner Mueller’s “Requiem for Hope and Reason”.
