COAST OF PLEASURES
With New Kyd, Edvinas Grinkevičius. Contributions by Jana Baldovino, Stanislav Iordanov, Annelie Schubert. Borrowing from Denis Diderot, Fritz Grünbaum, Erika & Klaus Mann, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.
For the 28th International Thomas Mann Festival in Nida, ,Bruch‘- adapts a largely forgotten satirical poem by the French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot in which the coastline of the Curonian Spit is transformed into a dreamscape to become a site of unlikely encounters.
In 1773, Diderot travelled from Paris to the court of the Russian empress Catherina II in St. Petersburg in search of practical applications of his encyclopaedic wisdom. Somewhere along the postal route between Königsberg (Kaliningrad) and Memel (Klaipėda), he composed a poem, which dramatically stages the peninsula’s uncanny landscape through the mythical imaginary of Roman poetry, grafting frivolous tableaux of Mediterranean gods onto the Baltic coast. Beyond its purpose as a pastime to escape the boredom and isolation of his travel, writing poetry here also fulfils a therapeutic function: The impending encounter between philosopher and authoritarian ruler is allegorised as a confrontation between traveller and the unruly forces of an animated nature in which the all too real stakes of engaging with an unknown, potentially hostile environment are turned into a playful farce.
Later, the travelling poet’s art of dissolving the concrete delimitations of time and space into more fluid configurations was inverted by Thomas Mann. His encounter with the Curonian Spit wasn’t confined to the realm of poetry but materialised in the construction of a house in Nida as part of an attempt to revitalise the cultural-political project of an eastward expansion of the ‘German Empire’. When his children Erika and Klaus Mann visited their father’s summer home in 1931, it is probable they experienced a state of boredom not unlike the one that had catalysed Diderot’s poetic outpour some 150 years earlier. One would like to imagine that they might have organised cabaret evenings in some beach bar, seeking temporary distraction and to escape their father’s regime.
For two nights in July, Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts invites ,Bruch‘- to open a wandering cabaret in the seaside studio and exhibition space of local painter Evaldas Šemetulskis. As a prologue to their operetta Diderot in Petersburg, which took shape in the context of a research period at NAC in summer 2023 and was staged at Theater Neumarkt in Zurich earlier this year, the ghost of the philosophical traveller is conjured up and brought into contact with the operetta genre’s virtuosity in manipulating surfaces and clichés with de-realising effects. Together with artists and performers New Kyd and Edvinas Grinkevičius (aka Querelle), ,Bruch‘- revisits the poets’ craft of creating ephemeral pleasures and temporary dwellings within politically precarious surroundings.
Curated by Egija Inzule. Funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, Neringa Municipality and Goethe Institut Lithuania. With thanks to Klaipėda Drama Theatre, Münchner Kammerspiele, Theater Neumarkt.