NOISE

Imagine fluorescent lighting above a screen showing a glitchy PowerPoint presentation. Imagine a young professional mom giving a semi-intellectual TED Talk on recovering from postnatal depression. Imagine vintage synthesizers accompanying a musical number about your baby falling off the couch. Imagine the world collapsing. Imagine far too many words. Imagine far too little hope. Imagine hope.

We live in a time of polycrisis: we are simultaneously confronted with the rise of fascism, the arrival of the climate crisis, Western complicity in a genocide, fruits and vegetables full of PFAS, and our own identities that turn out to be contaminated with (internalized) sexism, racism, and homophobia. Where a future of stability and progress was once promised, all the systems around us and within ourselves are threatening to collapse.? The human survival instinct (LION! DANGER! FIGHT OR FLIGHT! SURVIVE! CELEBRATE!) is failing massively when it comes to dealing with the complexity of today’s problems. Our amygdalas* are being immensely overstimulated and we are getting stuck in an anxiety limbo.

In the immersive performance opera 'NOISE', Club Gewalt explores an alternative to freezing up. The future is here: burying our heads in the sand is not an option but doomscrolling on the internet and compulsively reading self-help books are also only marginally constructive. Can we let the noise in and process it on an emotional level? Can we learn to accept the collapse of systems as cosmic law, without ceasing our protest against injustice? Can we prepare for the polycrisis by letting go of our resistance to vulnerability?

Through a derailed seminar on completing stress cycles, led by a group of chatty doppelgangers, the audience is slowly drawn into a collapse. Understanding and control are traded for an exercise in falling back in love with being human. Not by pretending that the future is better than it is, but by truly learning to listen to the noise. Cuz: never waste a good crisis.