True Dada (English Translation)

ERS with “Total Fictional Lie” in the Sophiensaele

by Eva Behrendt

A manager with the false eyebrows of our finance minister, a turkey dance repeated ad absurdum, a stammering press speech by Paul Anka — with his head in a box and his feet waving in the air — the bungled sale of a revised Bible edition, and a set mostly comprised of snack biscuits and three chairs: we’re writing in the year 1998, and we’re seeing perhaps the last disciples of Dada.

With “Total Fictional Lie” Elevator Repair Service presents a genuine world premiere, more specifically a production commissioned by the Berliner Festwochen for the “Next Generation” series. Just like “Cab Legs” — a repertory piece which the New York performers already showed last week in the Sophiensaele — “Total Fictional Lie” forgoes a logical throughline and combines things guaranteed not to go together into a pageant of absurd miniatures. Seemingly dilettantish and half-rehearsed moments, enriched with artful pauses that strike a very unamerican tone of ennui, play on familiar avangarde concepts. But unlike in “Cab Legs,” here the spoken words are reduced to a minimum and replaced with delicate everyday or dance club gestures that allude to choreography, all around the hit singer Paul Anka, who is thrust into the foreground. In seats or in loose aerobic formation, when the seven-person ensemble undergoes its physical training under the directon of John Collins and Steve Bodow, a curious contrast is always written in their faces: grim seriousness in the “Surprise-Box Dance”, flirtatious looks in “Dance of the Prisoners”.

The lack of coherence is accounted for — sadly — in an explanatory playbill: in its concept-raising phase the company brought home documentary films from the fifties, out of which a few of the fleeting subjects of the show were distilled. So neither the text nor the gestures are “fictional” but based on “authentic” US dreariness. A complete tour of the corporate halls of modern America — the strategic creation of pop stars, death penalty discussions, theology and door-to-door selling — recycled by ERS into ironic near-nonsense. Cultural Sociology 101? One seat over someone remarked that he spent the whole 50 minutes thinking of John Travolta. Which can certainly be very nice too. And a good beginning to a long night.

translation by Scott Shepherd