A wonderful review of our production SHIT ISLAND with interesting observations can be found in the April issue of Theater heute. Excerpts can be found here, the whole review can only be found in the magazine itself.
+++ "Shit Island. A Postcolonial South Sea Dream" from Futur3 in Cologne
refuses the colonial image +++
from F3 08.04.2018
[...] from briefly the richest country in the world to the devastated moonscape of today [...].
This curious and tragic story was dug up and carefully researched by the independent theatre collective Futur3, and brought to the stage as a parable of unleashed capitalism.
Images of real islanders and landscapes are consistently avoided, because the evening is also an investigation into how images of the foreign are created.
First, the audience sits down to a kind of live radio play in the semi-darkness around an illuminated flower altar (...) A soothing, meditative inner journey to the projections that Western heroes of the history of art and discovery have cast on the South Seas since as early as the 18th century - and thus created the cliché repertoire of today.
Increasingly, Eurocentric superiority and euphemistically veiled crimes can be sensed from the literary testimonies.
When the audience is invited to the other side of the stage, the time of the ethnologists dawns. In the projector light, the bodies are overwritten live with projections - a clever image for the exploitative Eurocentric gaze.
"They are simply not business-minded", the performers reenact two tourists who came to the island by chance ... Full of neo-colonially internalised beliefs, they show their holiday photos - and while the slide show is simulated only with picture descriptions, sounds, hand movements, the images of the destroyed, impoverished Nauru inflate in the audience's minds into a globalisation crime.
Click here for the online edition: Theatre Today, April 2018
Tags: germany / colonialism / theatre