Familie Flöz hail from Berlin and they do the rounds of German theaters so that audiences throughout the country get the chance to experience their magic. I was sure there were 6, 7 or 8 people on the stage during the 90 minute show, but in reality there were just 3 people. Three talented guys who had mastered the art of changing costumes with lightning speed, playing Maskentheater, working puppets, sword fighting and dancing around. Oh and they played a series of weird musical instruments too, which was their encore gig at the end. Throughout the show they wore a series of masks with rather contorted and vaguely spooky heads. The puppet doll at the beginning and end of the piece had me genuinely thinking that it was a real person until I realised it was being operated by the guy behind. Having briefly performed with the puppet doll the three guys then transformed themselves into a series of puppet dolls for the remainder of the show.



A publicity photo for Teatro Delusio

And what of the show? The setting is backstage, behind the scenery, so you get a sort of reverse effect that really worked well at the very end of the show. Here, during the applause, the three performers leapt out of the visual back of the stage in the direction of the real backstage, giving us the impression that we were far behind the stage and scenery and looking forward onto the stage. It's oddly difficult to explain lucidly and I'm beginning to doubt my own brain work now. And this is where this odd theater piece, wholly without text or speech, takes us: into a netherworld redolent of the feeling you get when you are just between waking and sleeping, a borderline dreamworld of misconstructed reality. This is an area I find very interesting and I feel that music plays a big role in these edge of reality scenarios. Here, there were a number of well chosen playback excerpts of music.



Info about the Teatro Delusio team

The story? There wasn't one, the action just moved from scene to scene, most of them somewhat unrelated, just in the way dreams do. In a dream you quickly forget the previous semi-reality as you focus on the new environment, while it takes you into the unknown. I am one of those who can control my dreams and if they start going into too horrible a place, or become too absurd, I can simply turn them off or divert the flow elsewhere. This is truly interesting stuff and you should try to catch a show if you can. It ran for 90 minutes without a pause.

05.07.25



Details in German about the show that I saw in Duisburg