Life… in Postmodernism Post-mortem
Our merchandised Faust is alone and locked inside a box.
Faust has already been damned. he is eeing, not towards an outside world anymore, but within himself. there is no more to seek, merely something to recover: his voice.
In the age of in nite sound reproducibility, Faust seeks one single sonority: that of his original and unique frequency which he relinquished to live his life through a puppet.
The narration theme is the search for his voice as a bridge between himself and the world. structured like a contemporary chamber opera, this temporal notation being understood as the synchronic articulation of modern language forms (sound, music, image, gesture, word, etc.) the play relates the drama and comedy – the “dramedy” – of this former superman.
without having to rely on another blood pact, faust is already member and accomplice of the spiritual animal kingdom feared by his famous ancestor. he turned democratic. are we all – or are we all becoming – Faust?

Thread
Faust’s shadow voice – Robert Wilson – sprinkles a few words, narrative triggers to map the intricate 13 scenes.
Alone, his back to the audience, and surrounded by his own reflection through a large rectangular mirror (the puppet theater where young Goethe saw Faust for the first time? the box – jail of our egotistical and technological studio?) Faust – Helga Davis – addresses his image to unravel his recollections (childhood, love, solipsism, power, money, etc.) along with his illusions, in search for a single word: happiness.
In the opera, Faust uses his seclusion voice like a scalpel – in every angle and in inflection – to cut the roots of his reflected “narcissuses”. he succeeds in his endeavor. his secular redemption and newfound life only appear at the end in true faustian style, as they coincide with a simple action: turning o the microphone – this auto-ampli cation device – and watching the darkness, and perhaps the others, beyond the stage boundaries.
In the impromptu technological void, in the fullness of inaudible frequencies, in what we call silence… he remains listening… he is not alone anymore. a sort of secular and necessary redemption, indicated by Goethe himself, in a famed Wilhelm Meister excerpt:
“[…] but when his education has proceeded to a certain pitch, it is advantageous for him that he learn to lose himself among a mass of men, that he learn to live for the sake of others, and to forget himself in an activity prescribed by duty. it is then that he rst becomes acquainted with himself”.