On 15 August 2025 during Tanz im August, Tournament, a collaboration between choreographer Adam Linder, composer Ethan Braun, and the solo ensemble Kaleidoskop, celebrated its premiere – a theatrical battle of symbols.
I’ll just jump right to the end. Because the end, the conclusion, is what I’m interested in and, now don’t contradict me, it’s also an important question given the state of the world. How do we end? Since we’re in the final days of humanity anyway, I’ll just jump right to the end.
At the end, at the end of the piece, there’s a puff of smoke from a cigarette, right in front of my eyes at the front edge of the stage. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a real cigarette. That’s of course a no go in the theater because of the fire safety measures, which you obviously knew. But it’s a good, a damned believable, imaginary cigarette. And it appears to be coming from nowhere. It wasn’t simply lying on the floor, it was more coming out of the floor, smoke right from the underworld, is what I mean to say.
The sweat-soaked dancer (I’m sitting opposite her at eye-level in the first row) takes a drag, deep and seductive. You, specifically I, feel the pull to take a drag of this internal nothingness. Or better yet, to be sucked into the (dancer’s) lungs with the invisible smoke and then, in the spirit of a truly spectacular and unexpected finale, be exhaled as a thousand molecules into a roar of applause.
If you’re asking yourself whether or not I’m blowing a lot of smoke for nothing, then let me say this: that wasn’t the only imaginary cigarette to appear in this piece. There was another appearance in an earlier scene, during which the entire string ensemble set aside its instruments and sprawled across the stage, legs akimbo in riding boots, white sheets over their faces, gesticulating wildly. A puff of smoke also arose from one of these headless gesticulators.
I’ll happily explain to you (even if you didn’t ask me to) what I think it all means. A cigarette, as you know, is not just a cigarette. A cigarette is a torch of freedom (greetings to Edward Bernays!), a symbol of boldness, of hedonistic pleasure. It is a symbol of the play between fire, death, and desire, in which the mouth plays an important role, from a purely evolutionary perspective. And that is exactly why, if you ask me, even every real cigarette smoked after the piece and in front of the theater is essentially an imaginary cigarette.
Believe me, I would love to continue this game and expound on, for example, what I think about the narrative power of flowers. There were a lot of flowers in the piece. And there was gardner, who was also a landlord, a pallbearer, and a master of ceremonies who led a procession bearing a cello to its grave. I think the gardner was secretly the mastermind behind this whole symbolic affair.
And I saw a bullfight (although I’m not entirely sure about that). Like I said, I would love to continue this game, but for now you’ll have to make do with my attempt to decipher the cigarette until you’ve hopefully had a chance to see the piece for yourself.
English translation by Melissa Maldonado
Tournament (Adam Linder, Ethan Braun, Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop) premiered on August 15, 2025 in the frame of Tanz im August.
