04-14 January 2006

THE SYSTEM

Tickets: 16

Falk Richter’s double bill THE SYSTEM confronts you with a heightened sense of what it means to exist in a highly digitised, globalised consumer-society where everything and everyone seems to be speeding faster and faster towards an unknown goal. Where human life is valued in profit margins and everyone is disposable.

In Electronic City, Part 1 of the double bill, Richter presents a neo-romantic love story incorporated in a multi-layered, reality TV documentary entitled “The Life of Joy”. The heroine is global standby support in the airport service industry and she’s desperately seeking, Tom, her George Clooney look-a-like, mid-level corporate executive. Tom, however, has forgotten all his pin-codes and is trapped in the corridor of his “Welcome Home” hotel. Without the technological support upon which his entire existence has become reliant, Tom slips into panic and psychosis.

In Part 2, Under Ice, Paul Niemand, a management consultant, is too old to start again and too young to retire. If efficiency and profit are the driving forces, Niemand knows his ‘personal effectiveness ratings” have dropped below acceptable levels and he’ll be next to be “rationalized”. His flight is closing, boarding has been completed, without him. He stands still. He freezes. As he hurtles, deliriously, through the incomplete memories and fantasies that was his life – the next generation is lurking, waiting for him to show a sign of weakness, waiting for the end of his career.

RAW

in association with

Project Arts Centre

and Goethe Institute

by Falk Richter

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