Marco FusinatoIN THE CORPSE OF THE PRESENT Prinz Friedrich von HomburgHeinrich von Kleist

Marco Fusinato’s IN THE CORPSE OF THE PRESENT unfolds across two levels of the Maxim Gorki Theater for eight hours each day over twenty-one days. The work occupies both the theater’s former foyer, transformed into a stage on the ground floor, and the main theater hall on the first floor. These two spaces operate simultaneously, inviting visitors to move freely between them and experience the work from different perspectives and durations.

Three source materials shape Fusinato’s adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist’s play Prinz Friedrich von Homburg:

In a yellow Reclam edition of the play, every line not spoken by the Prince has been crossed out, leaving him alone within the remains of the text. The second source is Deutsche Grammophon’s three-LP recording of Peter Stein’s landmark 1972 production at the Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer. The third is a forgotten monument to Kleist in the courtyard of a Berlin school. Its face has been scanned and reproduced as masks worn by the performers.

On the ground floor, in Gorki’s former foyer, the performers continuously activate these materials. Through their actions, literature mutates into vibrations and theater slips into ritual. They manually spin the records at glacial speed, stretching speech into guttural tones, sustained textures and fractured harsh noise. Wearing Kleist’s face and working with the Prince’s isolated words, they move between embodiment and disappearance. No single actor possesses the role; instead, the Prince passes from body to body, continually shedding a fixed identity.

In the main theater hall, Fusinato performs an extended electric guitar improvisation amid a continuous sequence of video material. Edited from diverse sources, the moving images unfold alongside overwhelming amplified sound, forming a contemporary image world of spectacle, collapse, transmission, and interruption.

The two levels give spatial form to the division at the heart of Kleist’s Prince. The ground floor returns repeatedly to language, discipline, and representation, while the theater above opens onto improvisation, collision, and excess. Like two coexisting states of consciousness, neither resolves the other. Without a prescribed beginning, sequence, or single point of view, IN THE CORPSE OF THE PRESENT is experienced through movement, duration, and proximity, allowing each visitor to assemble their own encounter with the work