ИСТИНА

Presented originally as a scene of 15 minutes in a Venetian palazzo during a Biennale workshop, the performance itself – in the form it exists now in the repertoire of the Schaubühne – preserves the features of a workshop or sketch: it is short (lasting only 75 minutes), is reminiscent in some moments of the public rehearsal situation, and even in the description it is called “Versuchsanordnung” (an “experimental arrangement”) which confirms its specific creation history. In Stanislavsky’s terminology, it is a sketch method (for which Stanislavsky himself used the term ètude,“этюд”) that Ostermeier usually applies in his productions: looking for justification of every movement of the actors, zooming in on the depth of the situation and the variety of psychological, historical and cultural circumstances, giving the actors extraordinary artistic tasks, from time to time demonstrating the way the moment should be embodied on stage. But Death in Venice is a sketch itself, and the logical question follows of How was that sketch rehearsed? The interweaving of different performing levels – text, choreography, movements, live music, singing, video; an experimental arrangement rehearsed in Germany and France over 18 days – Death in Venice is a rather atypical Ostermeier’s work when compared to his other (“psychological”) productions of Ibsen, Shakespeare or Strindberg. Ostermeier’s adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novella accompanied by Gustav Mahler’s music, preserves, in fact, the form of a workshop: as a rehearsal participant I was convinced that the spontaneous ideas, discussions, arguments emerging in the rehearsals remained in the performance in the original way. In this paper I study this experimental rehearsal method in its application to the sketch Death in Venice/Kindertotenlieder.