What is the similarity between a reggaeton band, two pizza delivery boys, a butcher, a talk show host with neanderthal DNA, the Vietnamese Red Army and a Chinese university? In Guillermo Calderon's imagination: a cow. The Chilean playwright and author is now a celebrity in international theatre and has been touring Europe since last Sunday.
At least: whether he will be there himself, we are not sure, but his performance Vaca (cow), after its world premiere in East German Weimar last Sunday, can be seen in Groningen this coming weekend, at the Noorderzon festival.
Who would have thought that excitement would flow through the streets of Weimar for such a world premiere: it didn't really happen. The play does not require complicated sets and ditto staging. It is, shall we say, not an ITA production. The premiere took place Sunday in Redoute, a theatre studio complex on an industrial estate between draughty residential buildings on the northern edge of the Thuringian town with that fraught name and heavy past.
The bus to the Buchenwald memorial site, some two kilometres uphill, stops at the door.
Pizza delivery drivers
The road is wallpapered with Alternative für Deutschland's slick election posters that drown out the small, modest and somewhat dull posters of the other parties. On 1 September, Thuringia is likely to vote in terrifying majorities for the PVV's openly fascist sister party, which incites hatred of foreigners and gays, considers Holocaust remembrance unnecessary and wants to end aid to Ukraine.
In a circle of theatre spots, the actors sit around an object under a tarpaulin, which could be a cow but turns out to be a pizza delivery scooter. Stage directions are projected on a tarpaulin hung behind the actors, and - in this world premiere - the actors' texts, in German. English was also promised, but there was no mention of that during the dress rehearsal, to the surprise of the festival management.
Everybody dead
Vaca is a dryly comic, rather tone-deaf and spoken text performance in a talk show setting faster than the subtitlers can keep up, where the actors switch roles simply by putting on a wig or a helmet. The cow that everything starts and ends with passes from hand to hand via a club of musicians to a pizza delivery lady. The animal turns out to be sick and dies. Meanwhile, a lot of money has been paid for it, which has to be returned with interest. To that end, an economic model has been set up that must be mainly at the expense of vaccine refusers. In the end, the military police shoot everyone.
The questions this all raises: I had come to Weimar for this - partly at the invitation of the festival - but due to an interesting chain of miscommunications, the director was not present at his dress rehearsal and anyway kind of untraceable for his company. I could, after a few hours' wait, return to Utrecht unchallenged.
It could easily be a scene from a Calderon play.
Personal Circumstances
Meanwhile, Calderon's mysterious disappearance on the world premiere weekend of his show 'Vaca' turned out to be related to complicated personal circumstances. Care for his needy child turned out not to match, so he had to arrange a new daycare himself on Sunday, and to make matters worse, he was robbed of a considerable amount of cash euros, the money he was supposed to use to finance his tour in Europe. This all took so much of his time and energy that he was virtually untraceable to colleagues and festival management for a long time (until late Tuesday). We hope to have another conversation with him.
English (UK) 
Nederlands 
Français 
