Close up

The piece fuses two scripts of Falk Richter (Play Loud and 2 Uhr Nachts) and combines the spoken word with movement language. Close Up circles around the topic of proximity and distance in its various forms: 1) proximity in our private lives and in work environment, 2) virtual proximity versus real life proximity. There is a shared feeling in our time that we can be close to whatever and whoever we want. That we can witness any event and still be far away from it.
The piece portraits a group of characters who are drifting between loneliness and the overload of connectivity. They start to create substitutes: a profession is put on a level with a personal relationship, it demands total identification and involvement and becomes a substitute partner, a substitute family. The border between the private and public self becomes liquid, as does the line between the real and imagined. There is the identification with and connection to roles in films, a reflection of certain aspects of one’s life. The charterers experience this connection as an escape from the self: saying scripted lines, reenacting other lives. The piece becomes a play with virtual images, bodies that copy and mirror each other, words that are transferred to other people. One is always somebody else and always in search of the lost self.