Presse – All in All

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“The emptiness of space keeps expanding, at some point our sun will go out. "But is there no hope?" ask Jan Philipp Stange and Nir Shauloff in their latest production "All in All". At some point in the course of this short hour, one begins to be downright afraid when one of the two again begins "You, Philipp ..." or "You, Nir ..." and then asks why the stars shine or why the moon exists or what the future holds for the universe.”
(Eva-Maria Magel, FAZ vom 23.12.2017)

“With "All in All" they have given their performance, which has now premiered at Frankfurt Lab, a pretty ambiguous German-English title. It's also about the greater good. The two young theater makers quickly make that clear. They invite their audience, which is intentionally limited to a small crowd, into the huge black hall of the Frankfurt Lab. In the middle of the barely lit room: a bright disc, which is not supposed to directly represent the sun. The sun, that is the musician Jacob Bussmann, who is installed high above the bright disk along with his armchair, keyboard and sound computer, and lets spherical sounds sound down like sparse but warm sunbeams. As earth children, we are destined to circle around the sun - on foot. The meditative effect of walking in circles for almost an hour, sometimes in pitch darkness, then sparklingly illuminated and sometimes taken by the performers' own hands, around a bright spot, is not to be underestimated. On the one hand it is whimsical and funny, it also sharpens the perception of others, of light and sound.”
(Eva-Maria Magel, FAZ, 23.12.2017)

“There are neat jokes in their sparse interaction like the one about Stange, carrying a circular and red-glowing little backpack, borrowing a drink of water from Shauloff, dressed with fruit and fairy lights in the clear backpack as a kind of Earth: the debate over the colonization of Mars packed into a single small image.”
(Eva-Maria Magel, FAZ, 23.12.2017)

“Of course, everything has to do with that wonderful song by Nick Cave, "Into my arms", which is heard at the end, that love song that speaks in the subjunctive of a creator in whom one, of course, does not believe, but still hopes that he may hold his hands protectively over those one loves. And so in the end, when the starry sky shines and Cave's scratchy prayer of love fills the hall of the Lab, we end up from physics back where people end up when they get maudlin and look at the vastness of space from their own little planet: with metaphysics. But cool.”
(Eva-Maria Magel, FAZ, 23.12.2017)

All in All, Mousonturm, Frankfurt, 2017

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Bizarre and funny.

(FAZ)

All in All is a spacewalk. Three performers invite the guests to walk with them in a circle around a glowing disc for one hour in the giant, empty hall of the Frankfurt Lab, in near complete darkness. It is left over to the spectators whether they want to experience the gravity and centrifugal force of celestial bodies up close or watch the production from afar. The musician Jacob Bussmann, the sun of the performance, hangs above the disc from the ceiling at a height of three metres and accompanies the walk with songs and sound material from, amongst other things, the Golden Record, a storage medium from the 1970s that was shot into space with the Voyager missions in order to pass on a best-of of human images, sounds and music to potential non-human civilisations.

The two other performers assume this gesture of ‘is anybody there’, carrying out a fragmentary conversation – repeatedly ensuring their reciprocal presence. This conversation is guided by the origins and end of the universe as well as the phenomenon of gravitational force. In the continuing darkness, a kind of subtle pillow talk ultimately unfolds, made up of half-truths, which also include fears, inaccuracies and familiarities. In this way, outer space in its incomprehensibility becomes the symbol of community for this performance, continuously pushing apart the outer limits of what is imaginable during its expansion, thereby slowly suspending the coherence of matter. The human gaze towards the stars and the expansion of outer space collide here in the experience of this drifting apart, being lost and falling. It becomes apparent that that there is no such thing as the one human gaze. All in All therefore rises and falls with its participants and their singular perspectives and behaviours, which appear no less mysterious than the universe itself. At the end of the piece, the two performers pull the musician back down from the sky to the theatre floor using a ladder, as many thousands of lights begin shining in the roof of the hall.

Premiere on 19 December 2017 at Mousonturm Frankfurt. Further performances on 20.12.2017, 21.12.2017, and 06.12.2018.
"All in All" was invited to the Made Festival as the winner of the audience award.

By Nir Shauloff and Jan Philipp Stange, Music: Jacob Bussmann, Light Design: Simon Möllendorf, Costumes: Maylin Habig, Dramaturgy: Annegret Schlegel, Production Management: Carmen Salinas, Assistant: Alex Mentzel | Photos by Irina Ximena Perez Berrio


With generous support from Mousonturm Frankfurt, Gessneralle Zurich, the Willy Pitzer Foundation, the NASPA Foundation, the HTA, studioNAXOS and the City of Frankfurt Department for Culture.

All in All
All in All