A new story does not want to arise in Nicole Beutler’s dance opera about the climate ★★☆☆☆

It sometimes seems as if sirens are going off during the new dance opera by choreographer and director Nicole Beutler. As thereminist Dorit Chrysler moves her hands through the invisible electromagnetic field of her electronic instrument and the distance narrows to the two antennas, alarm bells ring with varying volume and pitch. In her pristine white dress, she is reminiscent of an oracular angel. All the more so as she sings a sombre lament about the dire state of the earth and our tragic race against indomitable garbage heaps.

Unintentionally, however, the piercing motor skills of Chrysler’s hands illustrate the pedantic nature of Ginkgo or: 56 Million Years Ago There Were Palm Trees on the North Pole† As if the audience has to be constantly tapped on the fingers. The preachy tone – also for their own parish because those in the audience are not worried about the climate crisis – has turned against the performance from the start and unfortunately does not disappear. †Buy, sell, love!‘, five lone performers chant, scraping between bins of bulky waste that are poured over the large hall stage. Even when the global mourning for millions of years of earthly existence, sampled from texts by Timothy Morton, Gaia Vince, Bruce Lipton and Emmy Laura Perez Fjalland, among others, turns into a plea addressed to ‘Great Mother Gaia’, the moralizing nature remains dominant. Already gets Ginkgo then at least something melancholy. Especially because twelve choir members of Consensus Vocalis are allowed to sing an arrangement of Lacrimosa from Mozarts Requiem†

For the first half hour, the dozen singers, clad in orange work attire, are mainly engaged in staging even more discarded lamps, ironing boards, ladders, laundry baskets and sandpits. The ridge is also full of dumped iron and bags of PET bottles. Unfortunately, little new is done with this deliberately smeared junk shop. The performers try to create sheltered spots with it and dress themselves with fluttering plastic. This indeed creates a beautiful stage image, sorted by color, which contrasts beautifully theatrically against plumes of smoke and glows darkly against glowing rear walls. But it just doesn’t want to create a new story. Not even when the five each have their solo moment with a personal monologue.

The polar bear that Ginkgo or: 56 Million Years Ago There Were Palm Trees on the North Pole opens, sniffing among the rubbish heap as if it were once its north pole, refers to the super greenhouse effect and the closing image of Beutler’s impressive dance opera that won the VSCD Mime Prize 8: Metamorphosis (2019). But where she managed to capture the destructive power of patriarchal structures in a beautifully abstract way with shifting patterns, here she hollows out her sincere concerns with her penetrating call to turn the tide at the last minute. Ginkgo is the first part of Beutler’s multi-year climate trilogy Rituals of Transformation† An alarm bell may go off that the tone really needs to be changed.