About the recurring insanity of the world

Karla Kracht and Andrés Beladiez present their video performance at the International Figurentheater Festival

On friday starts the 19th International Figurentheater-Festival in Erlangen, Nürnberg and Fürth. The artists Karla Kracht and Andrés Beladiez represent many aspects that stand for this festival: they work with different media from shadow theatre to animated film and how their work around the world. We visited them during their rehearsals.

“ Essentially, we want to tell a story” says the spanish Andrés Beladiez makes a big gesture with his arms. It is not a small story, which the duo has chosen for their project “2062”: Power, war and their consequences around the world, for centuries – this is the topic of the 50 minute performance which will be presented the 15th and 16th of may at Künstlerhaus Nürnberg.

The two make no bones about it being difficult to digest. However their visual language is entertaining, just like a picture book that tells a spooky story. Beladiez comes from the theatre world, he works as stage director, dramaturge, sound designer and is involved in many other stage production jobs. Karla Kracht alias Alex Zitzmann studied Graphic Design and history of art, thus she comes from the visual arts, and since many years she presents video works in exhibitions and performances.

In the rehearsal space in the northern part of Nuremberg, cables wind around the floor, tiny alien-like stickmen gather around, so one has to be careful to not scrunch anybody. A whole city of cardboard boxes is set up at the wall; there are shops like “Astro Fast Food”, “Bullshit Jobs Extra” – the scenery for the live recorded video which is part of the project. The characters comic-like, though they are drawn meticulously detailed.

Global picture language

“We part from a first idea and use then many different techniques, to realise these ideas”, say the two artists, that don’t let themselves be pigeonholed. They have been working on this project for six months, with some timeout, often up to 14 hours per day.

Paper silhouettes of buildings, objects and figures are mounted onto narrow tracks, which move in front of the projection to compliment the video images. A sound collage, developed by the artists accompanies the images, sometimes small texts are faded [above the images].

There is no spoken text in 2062, the work of Kracht and Beladiez can be understood in the whole world: they have acted in Canada, Korea, Portugal, Spain, Germany [and many more] and let the images talk. “it is simply about the fact that humanity has hardly developed in the last thousands of years. We think nowadays we are more civilised than medieval people, but we continue to make the same wars, build the same walls and cause the same catastrophes” says Beladiez. “Today we have an insane load of information about all these inadequacies, but you cannot do much about it because the structures are extremely interwoven”, says Karla Kracht.

There are no easy solutions. The performers don’t want to give an answer [to these problems]. But they want to narrate with their impressive images, ask questions and stimulate reflection. They also let themselves be led by images, such as a photo from a perfectly neat golf course in the spanish enclave Melilla, on which some gentlemen play golf, whilst in the background African people try to climb an immensely high border fence in order to enter Europe. Another image that makes one speechless, about a problem for which no solution is there. How all this connects and belongs together, is probably easier to understand when you have seen “2062”