PHACE | Reise nach Comala

“We have to dig up the dead again and again, because only from them can we obtain a future.” (Heiner Müller)

The music theatre Reise nach Comala (Journey to Comala) is a conversation with the dead. The fallen Mexican village Comala is a place where the voices of the unredeemed are preserved and continue to resonate.

The work is based on Juan Rulfo’s only novel, Pedro Páramo (1955), which is nowadays acknowledged as a classic of modern Latin-American literature and regarded as a solitary, bold pioneer of Magic Realism. Highly symbolic and allegorical, Rulfo reviews the revolutionary era in Mexico and its social and individual preconditions.  The drama portrays a rigid community trapped in a system of dependency and complicity, self-deception and corruption. Unable to struggle for renewal, memory fragments about Comala and its story under Páramo’s autocracy are told, interwoven at various time levels. The more and more disoriented reader is invited to reconfigure the story for himself.

Germán Toro Perez’ work is a “theater of voices”, a multi-layered sound space, in which the clear boundary between audience and stage will be blurred. Generally inspired by aspects of life and reality that are transformed into musical forms by means of abstraction processes, the composer Germán Toro Pérez has been focusing on the Mexican author, his literary devices and his existential issues for several years: “The contradictory, prismatic identity of modern man and the word as a base for creating worlds.” (Germán Toro Pérez). In almost tangible presence, speaking or singing voices, visible or disembodied, create a hallucinatory and labyrinthine compartmentalized sound cosmos.