The journey up to the Rettenbach Glacier is a long one: from the ski resort of Sölden in the Austrian Alps a narrow, winding road leads up to the foot of the glacier, 2,700 metres above sea-level. However, on my visit it didn’t feel remote; several thousand people had gathered for ‘Mars: 2068’, a multimedia spectacle from the company Lawine Torren, which in previous years has staged successful and popular productions in the same location.
The edge of the snowy stage was demarcated by a crowd control barrier. The audience stood in the car park for the nearby cable car, keeping warm as best they could in the approaching dusk; many of them had, like myself, rashly underestimated the insidious cold of the Alpine night. Beyond giant video screens, two industrial cranes and the platforms and ramps on stage built from blocks of ice (some as big as houses) the glacial bowl loomed up on all sides to provide an impressive backdrop to the natural theatre.
Once darkness had fallen, coloured lights began to play over the glacier, and the video screens lit up with an array of futuristic images, some pre-recorded and others filmed live from the actors, who began to emerge onto the stage. When a steam train began to chug across the mountain and parachutists bearing flares descended from planes overhead, the tone of wildly extravagant effect but utterly unfathomable logic was set for the evening. The plot, such as it was, was based on the premise that it is the year 2068, and Mars is a colony used as the location for an extra-terrestrial ‘Big Brother house’ from which footage is relayed in real time to a supposedly captivated audience on earth. In a twist of self-referentiality the colonists themselves work for the television companies that compete for supremacy of the airwaves, trading in an economy based not on money but on media exposure. Offsetting this futuristic fantasy are the story’s persistent but tenuous references to Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid, most obviously in the names of characters and corporations (‘TROI’ is an acronym for ‘Terrestrial Orbital Industries’) but also significantly in the non-linear narratives of these two epics. Unsurprisingly, this made for neither clarity nor profundity, especially when combined with the dialogue’s inexplicable switches between Austrian-German and English.
However, where narrative nuance may have failed, the show won out on pure old-fashioned spectacle. Lawine Torren excel in devising context-based theatre that uses whatever materials come to hand. For this particular end-of-season extravaganza they employed anyone and everyone from the local community that was willing to contribute. A ski resort offers a particular set of skills and abilities, and consequently world-class skiers, snowboarders, skidoo riders, piste basher-drivers and skydivers were all employed to contribute to the action. Hubert Lepka, the creative force behind Lawine Torren, may be a fantastic catalyst, but he is certainly no editor. However, as the fireworks exploded into the sky over a ten-ton truck swinging from the arm of a crane while skiers somersaulted through the air below, it was more fun to abandon attempts at comprehension and instead revel in the show’s sheer, absurd magnificence.
