Anne Schmidt
Echo - Play in a maquette
Installation and performance | Sign Stiching | Groningen, NL
Linda Stauffer & Anne Schmidt
Zoom performance "ECHO - Play in a Maquette"
Sunday, 14th of February, between 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM, durational, loop of 20 minutes, drop in drop out
via Zoom
Regie und Kamera: Anne Schmidt und Linda Stauffer
Schnitt: Linda Stauffer
Audio: Anne Schmidt und Linda Stauffer
Set Design: Anne Schmidt und Linda Stauffer
Costumes: Anne Schmidt
Muppets: Linda Stauffer
With Echo, Stauffer and Schmidt have realized a stage play for marionettes on a miniature stage in five scenes. The stage architecture adapts to the spatial structures of the Signs basement. This site-specificity skillfully brings the architectural moments of the exhibition space to the stage and celebrates them by highlighting the extraordinary importance of the details of life. In the stage conception of Echo, interiors, facades, ornaments, marble, gold, chocolates, faces, and fruits enviously pale before one another. The play itself is about the agender characters Clitoris, Siren, Splash and Viech. In the non-linear plot, fiction becomes reality. At the same time, the relationship between miniature and giant shifts through the puppeteers' costumes.
Films
Chapter 1: Rotten Castle
Marionette Siren is distinguished by her unusual, consumed tree disease face and round, pregnant body. The figure, which is not assigned a gender, inhabits an old Piranesian-style masonry building. It is painted with antique-looking murals, and the words „Elende“ from Bertold Brecht‘s dime opera decorate the portal in gold. A headless rooster lives in the back room.
Chapter 2: Appendages
Puppet Critter is a sympathetic character. The multitude of limbs makes him a challenge in the game. In the second chapter, Critter encounters the deep sea creature Splash. The quality of the stage architecture and puppets as hanging stands out.
Chapter 3: Vandalism of all Threads
In a gilded dance hall there is a small ambitious dancer. Movements remotely reminiscent of Japanese ghost dance Butoh are imitated by the puppet on a dance floor made of latex skin.
Chapter 4: Backstage
The character Splash swims through the five-part stage architecture and discovers a little guy at a tree root; the two perform a pantomime interaction.
Chapter 5: Artifical Garden
The scene of the puppet clitoris takes place in an artificial garden. Klitoris performs together with a latex quince. The soundtrack by Linda Stauffer, which underpins the entire piece, is accompanied by a text passage by Anne Schmidt.