Er Ist Bertie Einstein
Albert Einstein visits China, corresponds with Sigmund Freud and insults Marilyn Monroe in an experimental performance that promises literal explosions.
Albert Einstein was in China when he first received official notice of his Nobel Prize win. It was 1922 and he had just disembarked in Shanghai after a long ocean voyage on his way from Europe to Japan. He stayed only one night but would return several times. These visits provide the inspiration for Ich Bin Bertie Einstein, which will be performed at Creek Art this month.
The play was developed in workshops, which led to an ambitious assembly of languages, genres and media. The singing and dialogue are in English and Mandarin. Opera singers from Wuhan, with costumes inspired by skyscrapers, perform alongside the four expat actor-creators. In addition to music scored for the show, and Marlene Dietrich songs, digital equipment will be used to capture live movement and convert it into sound.
Do we really want to have chickens?
And there’s more. The press release mentions live animals.
Lucy Brydon performs in the play and wrote much of the dialogue. She says, “there’s definitely going to be lots of spontaneous fun, but whether it’s going to be live-animal related, we were discussing that. Do we really want to have chickens? It might be a bit out there. But I think there’ll definitely be explosions. I think it will be quite explosive.”
Even without exploding chickens, the play will be more unusual than most Shanghai shows. “You don’t really see that much alternative performance here, particularly integrating two languages,” Brydon says. “But do you come to Shanghai and do Shakespeare? It’s like, well, no.”
While the production is experimental, the script stays true to events in Einstein’s life. “We just used things he’d actually done,” Brydon says. “We’re also using some of his actual texts, some letters he’d written, because he also has a very interesting letter exchange between Sigmund Freud and himself.”
According to director Alejandra Pinggera, main characters such as Freud and Einstein will be played by several actors. “At the moment it’s four [Einsteins] but maybe there are going to be more,” she says. These different Einsteins and Freuds represent one of the play’s overarching themes: that it’s all relative. Every one of us is a different person in each other’s eyes.
Pinggera led digital-friendly art gallery Island 6 Shack before it shuttered its doors, and the idea to use cameras to create sounds is hers. In Ich Bin Bertie Einstein, “Movement is supposed to create music instead of the other way around where music creates movement,” she says. Again, the play raises questions about the relationships between its constituent parts.
In a way, the performance champions doubt. Einstein, Pinggera says, “believed so much in his own thought that it ends up being something very dangerous. That’s why Freud is a very big part of the play, because they have a big discussion about peace and war.”
8pm, 5-12 December. RMB 100. Creek Art, 3F, 424 Guangfu Lu, near Wuzhen Lu. Tel: 156 0162 7999
