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  • Dance meets cannibal orgy: Constanza Macras brings ‘The Hunger’ to Volksbühne

Interview

Dance meets cannibal orgy: Constanza Macras brings ‘The Hunger’ to Volksbühne

With 'The Hunger', director and choreographer Constanza Macras tackles a cannibalistic chunk of South American history.

Photo: Makar Artemev

The ethos of celebrated theatre director and choreographer Constanza Macras is embodied by the stylised, uncanny movements – a physicalised distancing effect – that she’s become known for since moving to Berlin in 1995.

After a draining year of premieres for her interdisciplinary theatre group Dorky Park, which she founded in 2003 (The Visitors at Ruhrtriennale, Drama at the Volksbühne, and Carmen at Theater Basel), the indefatigable Macras – who also moonlighted as Yorgos Lanthimos’s choreographer for his critically-acclaimed films The Favourite and Poor Things – has concentrated all her attention lately on a single object: a historical novel about a 16th-century cabin boy captured by cannibals on the Rio de la Plata in South America.

It’s a perhaps unexpected fixation for an artist whose work usually takes on the contemporary, but while The Hunger, which debuted at the Volksbühne in September, might draw inspiration from Juan José Saer’s novel The Witness, her production of this strange episode of cannibalistic frenzy – full of live-action filming and internet-inspired movement – is very much about the present day.

Macras tells me that she’s coming to understand “the hunger” that her piece explores as a desire for all that we lack – a product of late capitalism, but also something that might just be an unrelenting part of the human condition. 

Photo: © Thomas Aurin

How would you describe your work’s relationship to the novel? 

We use the novel as a starting point, the central moment of the novel, which is the moment that [the narrator] always comes back to in his memory – when they arrive in Rio de la Plata, which is [a river] between Argentina and Uruguay.

It was the first expedition that went that far [South]. They disembark and then everybody gets killed, but this boy – who is also kind of obviously genderqueer, a little bit more feminine. He’s very young and he’s, it’s implied, the lover of the captain. We just basically focus on that event of the purge that the tribe has after they chase all the people in the ship. They kill them all, they cook them, they eat them, then they drink some alcohol, and then they have a huge orgy.

There is this voracity that human flesh awakens in the people who are eating it, and what brings them to the next [excess] and the next and the next. Today we live in this air-tight system of breaking out of and coming back to normality. In Berlin, you have club drugs – people go on a binge for days, which has something to do with that for me, this getting lost. And out of this episode, which he describes constantly in the novel, there comes this terrible sadness. It’s almost a wish for self-mutilation and abandonment – that is also part of this ritual. It has a lot to do with this human condition of loneliness.

You can convey unnameable feelings with dance.

And so, in this performance, we take that as this hunger for finding something that sort of bridges the unbearable feeling of loneliness that at the end is going to come anyway. It has to do with consumption, overconsumption, addiction, you know? And this is, again, modern times. It’s the internet. It’s everything that’s pushed into us. Because of our human condition and fragility, we just become basically instruments of consumer society.

How do you translate these ideas into dance onstage? 

We use many different modes of movement. So, for example, there’s a whole part where the actors move like NPCs [non-player characters]. This is something that could be super literal – you’re transported into some kind of video game. But then it just sort of creates a distance; it has enough detachment to not become pantomime completely. You know what I mean?

The expressions of the body, they’re just abstract. And the good thing is that you can convey unnameable feelings with dance. And that’s why I think it is a great medium, because once you get into the area of pure movement, there’s stuff that is not written in words. So you can’t describe what it is exactly – but you know.

And I think that’s why it’s very important, because some parts [of The Hunger] are very literal and very, very clear. There’s text and there’s video and a lot of live camera. Actually, we use a lot of the medium of video to paraphrase the way that videos are made on the internet. It has a lot of video, but it’s not as if video captures and reproduces everything that’s happening on the stage. And it really creates a very nice tension between what happens in life and what happens on camera.

Photo: © Thomas Aurin

This past year has involved so many premieres for you. Did your work on these other shows influence your conception of The Hunger?

After Carmen, I felt really tired and like I had no more ideas. It was like a dry desert in my brain. We had the idea that okay, we’re going to work on [something based on Saer’s novel The Witness], but, you know, I had no idea how to imagine the stage for a ship, or an island – how we’re going to do this [in a way] that is not ridiculous and figurative.

I was in Paris with my son – after Carmen, we went on holiday. I was eating a schnecke [“snail”], like a pistachio-raisin [swirl], and, and it was cut. There was one part here, one part in the centre. And I took a picture of that, and I sent it to Simon [Lesemann, the set designer], and I said, I think this is the direction of the stage.

And instead of saying, “Oh, stop pretending that you’re such a big artist, and what are you talking about?”, he was like, “Oh, that’s great.” So we call the stage “the croissant”. But it’s not, really, because we have an island in the middle, and then an amphitheatre – that’s how I saw it.

They kill them all, they cook them, they eat them, then they drink some alcohol, and then they have a huge orgy.

The centre of the ‘croissant’ could be used like a ship, it could be used like a mountain. It could be used like so many things – it’s such an organic piece of stage. It has wheels, it moves around, it’s pretty fantastic. So in that sense, I feel like a lot of accidents had to happen from daily life.

How do you make room for these accidents in your process?

I try to have some points on which I know I’m going to be working, you know. But then, on the other hand, I really hope for what I call the lucky accidents to happen. And once an accident happens, then you can really research and build on it, and become very serious about it.

But it’s that little opening, so that you’re not pushing things from A to B to C, being completely logical – what the Germans are so obsessed with, which is a red line. I think you find a red line anyway. But I think when you push the red line, it becomes just so discursive and pedagogic and predictable.

I think we move on so many levels of information and perception that we have to open doors for things to happen that are not expected when we’re creating. So in that sense, this is what I always hope for when I work. I’m always thinking – it’s best when I don’t know everything, because if I know everything, it’s probably going to be the same as the [production] before. If I don’t know everything, it’s going to be very painful to find out, but at least it will be different and it will be exciting to do. I’ve been in this business for 20 years, you know, so I need to have this freshness of every project being new.

Photo: © Thomas Aurin

Do you have a sense what you’re looking to find out with The Hunger?

I want to connect Saer [to the present], because I think that novel has a lot to do with the internet and now – and it does. But the process is how to make that clear in a show. And it’s magic how that starts happening. Because as you start doing research, something we’re doing opens up another door to more research and another book and another thing I’m reading.

And I think that openness is also what brings me excitement. That little space of not knowing some things – it’s very important, because you want to know them at the end, and you wish the audience knows them with you. But you don’t want them to know that from the beginning – when you open a two-hour show, and they watch the first five minutes and think they know how it’s going to go. But luckily not. It doesn’t go that way – you don’t know. And it’s difficult to create that effect if you know from the beginning what you’re going to do.

  • Volksbühne, Linienstr. 227, Mitte, The Hunger, Oct 9 and 18, English with German surtitles, details.