Diamante

It’s as if all the fragments of Büchner’s play “Woyzeck” were being performed simultaneously in a vast hall. Spectators move between locations and connect the scenes together into a play of their own. Something like this, only with a contemporary story, is what happens in the performance of Mariano Pensotti’s grand parable about the growth of Argentinian society: “Diamante” is a model play about a model society. In a walk-through environment of elaborately co-ordinated scenes performed in parallel the audience experience social change in a workers’ settlement on the edge of the jungle. This is a special place: around 100 years ago, according to this fiction by writer, film director and theatremaker Mariano Pensotti, it was constructed in northern Argentina by the German industrialist Emil Hügel for his coal and steel company “Goodwind”.

Now Diamante is a kind of Silicon Valley in the jungle and the audience of this play encounter its inhabitants in the Festspielhaus in between their homes – they live and party with them, spend six hours watching them for like their own neighbours and see how in the course of a year this model society turns into a place of violence: communal physical exercises and community concerts give way to hold-ups and xenophobia. The factory’s proud workers gradually become service providers, the sense of community disappears and young people start to look for their own forms of escape.

Mariano Pensotti places stories on stage in a mix of reality and fiction presented as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk made up of acting, installation and music. Within the opulent set for this production audience members navigate their own route through the lives of its many inhabitants. Mariano Pensotti not only recounts the history of the private city of Diamante in Argentina, but also makes clear just how individually every biography turns out in this political scenario, how many small decisions ultimately lead to a broader history that represents the crossroads at which our own society now stands.