BERLIN -- When Joachim Hamster Damm describes himself as "a designer, actor, puppet-builder, and computer artist," he's not simply checking off bulleted points from his résumé.
No single word adequately describes just what Damm was up to in a Berlin club at one o'clock in the morning last weekend.
Damm's solo performance No Time to Lose -- a chaotic mishmash of video, pantomime, robotics, puppetry, and thumping techno -- was presented as part of the 17-day Theater der Welt [Theater of the World] festival, which wraps up 4 July. No Time to Lose was one of 38 productions from 25 countries.
The performance took place in a small club tucked off to the side of a train station and proved to be a tightly choreographed production, with a classical three-act structure divided into nine movements of precisely nine minutes each.
Damm, 34, is also something of a DJ, segueing between layers of various materials, imagery, and hyperkinetic performance along with the typical spinner's repertoire of break beats and samples.
At the thematic core of this multimedia display is the breakdown in the relationship between humankind and its machines, so it's hardly a surprise that Damm begins with a reenactment of the sinking of the Titanic.
Could there possibly be a fresh angle on this story of human hubris and misplaced faith in technology? Damm finds a few. Under his neon proscenium arch, the ship is a tiny toy creeping along at a Robert Wilsonian pace while Damm himself plays the iceberg.
Leaping in and out of costume, rapping in German, politicking in Russian, drawing, painting, dancing, Damm is a mad scientist conducting experiments on himself and, of course, his audience. In the course of these 81 minutes, a robotic arm lurches and grasps aimlessly, windows and folders open and close at random on an old Macintosh, and an explosion of shrunken puppet heads on rubber bands is sent dangling over the spectators.
But there is rhyme and reason to this madness. After the overweening pride of the industrial age sinks to the tune of a techno track littered with sampled snippets from pop culture (clips from sci-fi flicks and a Monty Python sketch -- "Just how do you intend to use this phrase, 'No time to lose'?"), the room bleeds red. As Damm enthusiastically waves American, Soviet, and German flags, all of which have flown proudly over his native Berlin, the images and yelping speeches of Hitler and Stalin blare, punctuated with explosions, military marches, and patriotic folk songs.
By the time the third act rolls around with its digital data smog clouding countless clones of Damm's televised talking head, the 20th century has been unmasked as an inglorious pageant of collapse and failure.
If it seems the whole world has been crammed onto Damm's stage, that would be due in part to the fact that Damm has been working on the piece since the mid-'90s. But there's also Damm's fascination with the Teatrum Mundi, a mechanical theater dating back to the 18th century and used primarily by puppet shows traveling through Saxony. He built one as early as 1993, and his second production for the Theater der Welt festival, debuting 1 July, will unveil his newest and most elaborate yet.
Wassertheater (Water Theater) has been evolving since Damm's days in art school. He remains tight-lipped when it comes to the details, but the piece involves "water-spewing, leaping, and diving figures" propelled by falling water and the "transition from the mechanical-electronic to the digital age." And if No Time to Lose is any indication, Berliners will be able to dance to it as well.
