Theater der Welt festival invited thirty theater groups from seventeen countries around the world to Berlin for two weeks. … Enrique Vargas’s Teatro de los Sentidos brightened the theater landscape of the German capital with an unforgettable instance of theatrical poetics and provocation. … I believe that such an unusual theater justifies an unusual description. Tangents, free associations, and allusions belong to such a description,just like the dark and dead-end corners of the labyrinth whose secrets one can only suspect during the journey, and whose fleeting shadowdwellers avoid the light of day. But the fact that I can see, even momentarily, the fairy-tale figures and the demons of childhood suddenly come forth and tell stories, sing, dance—this must record for all who could not see and smell and touch in this magic theater of the senses, but who perhaps might read its name on a poster in a city and not just walk by. … Behind a weakly lit curtain lies another room, similarly decorated in an old-fashioned style with a tall, open cabinet full of vials, glasses, and spice boxes. The female dweller of this next room offers the visitor different containers to smell— sandalwood, ginger and curry, sweat and tears—and the visitor may proceed only after he has found the smell of his question. The actress (Malah Helman) does this with such grace
and ease, without the attitude of a fairy-tale figure or teasing gestures, that I assumed she had done nothing else for eternity other than collect the aroma of strangers’ questions in the “room of smells.” …
Holger Teschke
Translated by Karen Remmler
published in The MUSE, 1999
Schlagworte: Enrique Vargas, Interaktives Theater, Teatro de los Sentidos, Theater der Welt 1999