Girl From The Fog Machine Factory
Business is not going well at the small fog machine factory at the outskirts of the city. Orders are meager: in the current situation nobody wants to buy machines anymore that basically do not produce anything. The boss and his employees–his son, an unpaid intern as well as some musicians hired for setting music to fog for sales presentations–stand around without a clue in the showroom, pondering silently how to survive in the future. In order to make ends meet financially, new ideas are needed, new images, new solutions. The workforce begins to experiment: waterfalls, rings of planets, gleaming seas of fog, famous Rodin and Giacometti sculptures, and Böcklin’s isle of the dead with a row boat, all recreated out of fog. Ephemeral to be sure, but at least something. All the machinery and all the knowledge about fog from the last 225 years of the firm’s lifespan are put into play. Fleetingly opulant images crafted through practical sensual freedom arise before the eyes of the occasional customers who pop in when passing by. But whether the future of the company can be saved by such transient short-lived beauties is literally up in the clouds. We’ll see – or maybe not.
This new production of Swiss music theater artist and director Thom Luz deals with the most intangible aspects of being human and of storytelling: If something is changing constantly, how can it be captured? And should this even be attempted?
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