August / September 2004 Director Martin Wuttke of the theatre “Volksbühne” in Berlin brought Solaris to a hangar on an airfield in a village east of Berlin. I was there and saw it. Here come some impressions.
The performance is based upon the idea of the director
Martin Wuttke and goes beyond the content of Solaris. It discusses the theory of cognition, limitations of quantum physics, philosophy of thinking and more. Language was German. | The piece started with Kris' arrival at the Solaris station and his attempts to find Gibarian. He is also confronted with Harey. Later, there
are two actresses playing Harey and both appear on stage at the same time. Further, the Solaris ocean is played by a man who is always around: a clever way to show the omnipresence of it. Solaris also takes part in the numerous conversations on cognition, philosophy and physics.
Another issue raised was the questions if it would be possible to prove that the crew members don't dream all this. It lead to the works of Kant about cognition of the "thing itself" (Are we able to
recognize the "thing itself" as a whole or are we only recognizing the part of it that we are able to understand and see and consider that part to be the whole thing?) |
| The hangar The "stage" is a
hangar of app. 100 x 100 squaremeters and 15 mtrs high. The huge gate was wide open and the actors also used part of the airfield, up to 100 mtrs away. The audience was placed on a tribune inside the hangar facing the gate. In the right portion of the gate there was a videowall with three screens, one on top of the other. The cabins and the library were semitransparent greenhouses, distributed across the scenery. |
Kris, both Hareys, Snaut, Satorius, and Solaris move from one cabin to the next. Here’s Snaut’s room:
creative chaos?
multiple perspectives allow the audience to follow what’s going on even in the remote cabins out on the airfield. Overlayed film fragments
contribute to the athmosphere of Solaris. | The core discussion goes as follows: In the physics of black holes there is the assumption that all known forulas of whatever theory only work outside the black hole. In it,
forces, gravity and everything becomes infinite. With infinity you can't do any calculations anymore. The whole theory breaks down. Between the outside (were physiscs is just fine) and the inside the must be a sharp border, the so called Schwarzschild border (named after the physician Schwarzschild). The analogy here is that the humans brought all their culture, knowledge, philosophy and science to the Solaris station orbiting Solaris. But they can't recognize what the ocean actually is. They
are at a Schwarzschild border and the ocean is sort of a black hole.
For example the guests consist of neutrinos. Neutrinos are extremely light and superfast particles. The question is how the ocean could slow down these superfast particles to form atoms out of them. And that without any machinery or even a thought. It's just an ocean.
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