© Christian Ganet 'Umwelt' reviews recent Compagnie Maguy Marin reviews more Rachel Straus reviews Discuss this review (Open for at least 6 months)

This hour-long, cast-of-nine production sounded like the tornado in The Wizard of Oz and looked like the Transporter Chamber in the Star Trek series. Like the Trekies, the performers materialized and de-materialized beyond half a dozen shaking silvery doorways, as though they were traveling through the Enterprise’s space-time dimension. And like Dorothy and her belongings spinning inside the tornado’s vortex, the cast appeared with lots of props and baggage, basically everything but the kitchen sink. The music designer Denis Mariotte added to Marin’s carefully choreographed chaos by sliding a wire, coming from two spools, across the strings of three electric guitars downstage. The resulting cacophony vibrated up through my seat.

In the first ten minutes of this 2004 work I moved beyond feeling dumb about not knowing the meaning of the work’s German title and I put away my fears of being rendered deaf by the soundscape. I was spellbound. Then Umwelt, which means surrounding world, began to weigh on my battered my senses, much like being out in a storm without cover must feel. Instead of being lashed with rain and wind, my fellow travelers and I were lashed repeatedly with an insane amount of repetition.

The performers, who resembled not Star Trek über beings but regular folk, always entered from one door and left from another. In twos and threes, and always in unison, they walked, fell, touched their bad knees and stared deadpan at the audience. The only entertaining alternations occurred with the changes in costumes and props, which included party dresses, hats, shackles, full frontal and posterior nudity, racks of raw meat, potted trees, babies, stuffed animals, guns, pit helmets, flashlights, sandwiches, apples, and garbage bags. This detritus and its accompanying glimpses of action (making love, war, a home behind that door) is the stuff of life, implies Marin, whose company has been based in Rillieux-la-Pape, France for a decade. This fact, according to her poetry in the Playbill, represents how “the complexity becomes multiplicity. /So that the world is no longer complex, but multiple—plural.”

I got it and enjoyed the absurdist minimalism costume show for twenty minutes, but at the thirty, forty and fifty minute mark of watching these performers entering and leaving, I wanted to follow them behind those silvery doors, especially when the glimpse I got of what they were doing promised a narrative. Many audience members opted for another kind of doorway when met with this frustration. They fled toward the theater exit.

Umwelt finally ended, when lighting designers Alexandre Béneteaud and Denis Mariotte burnished the shimmering Transporter glow and the last piece of material crap was thrown to the floor. The tornado was over. Then one bold audience member yelled, “Boo!” Those of us who remained to the end of the sold-out show laughed in response and in collective relief. Then we clapped and passed through numerous doorways to get our selves, like Dorothy, home.