Staging
A jester has set up his fairground booth. He catches pictures out of the air, tells crazy stories and plays tricks on the audience.
Stepping through the gate of the booth, a completely different world opens up: a maze of thousands of lights. The visitor becomes a traveller: Suitcases - like peep-boxes - are waiting to be taken along. Figures live in the labyrinth who are also searching for their way: The prince who doesn't want to become king; the bird-woman who won't give up her dream of flying; the lamp-dreamer who paints magical light pictures of a foreign land and asks the visitors for the way there...
The idea
The Great Journey tells of the journey of human life. The maze - a variation of the labyrinth - is one of the oldest symbols of this journey: People who enter the labyrinth reach the centre, the middle, themselves. The journey of life is reflected in the hero's journey - the basis of many epics and classic Hollywood cinema films: The hero goes out into the world to have his adventure. Purified and grown up, he returns home to do good. The story of Theseus and the Minotaur in the Labyrinth of Knossos is exemplary for the fact that the hero's journey and the labyrinth as a dramatic place belong together. Theater Anu does not stage a Minotaur or a hero's tale, but offers visitors the opportunity to reflect on the Minotaurs in their own life's labyrinth. In the atmosphere of thousands of candles, thinking quickly turns into a reverie of poetic images.
The candlelight
Would you like to come to rest? "So breathe carefully before a delicate flame that leisurely does its light work." This invitation is found in Gaston Bachelard's "The Flame of a Candle", a book that deals with candlelit reverie in a poetic-philosophical way. With his catchy language, Bachelard evokes "reverie by small light" back into people's consciousness. Because thinking by candlelight immediately disappears into reverie: images flare up, the mind becomes calm. They are images not of this world. Images that transcend the real, that recall dreams, desires and stories thought lost. Images of archaic power that we mostly only know from ancient myths. We have arrived in the sphere of reverie, which is foreign to us and yet so close.
Anyone who enters our labyrinths of lights soon feels transported into a state of reverie. It is hardly possible to escape the atmosphere of these vast seas of light. As a dreamwalker, you travel through these worlds, encountering figures who tell of their dreams and desires, but who - like the dreamer himself - are unable to live them.
Bachelard characterises the poetic image as a "direct reference of one soul to another, as a meeting of two beings who feel happiness", telling and understanding each other in a poetic pictorial language.
We at Theater Anu wish that the poetic images - ours as well as those of the travelling visitors to our "World of Little Light" - will enable this very communication, allow a game to emerge in which two beings - we players and you as visitors - feel happiness. We create the sphere of reverie, in which we hope you will dream beyond the night of the maze of lights.