In Hackensack

Jürg Laederach, the master of non-realism, presents here four new minimal pieces, as black as the keys of Thelonious Monk's piano in the title piece, black as the darkness under the blanket where two men lie together, struggling with the narration of their medical history, black as the series-noir grotesque 'Codge's Phase', and as gloomy and dark as the conversation in an elevator where the lights have gone out. Jürg Laederach's sentences are the true figures of his pieces. They play a game in the reader's mind, as if one were looking through them into the darkness behind the eye sockets of others. A gruesome piece of theater, terrifyingly funny and as brilliant next door as Monk's disharmonies - 'I only meet where I know where'. Laederach unfolds occasions, outlines, functional formulas, game plans, dominoes in the style of Japanese Nô theater, in the board art manner of Karl Valentin, and in Beckett's endgame form, where material and method analyze and methodically expose each other amidst laughter. The dramatic workshop is part of the stage and spreads the necessary heartless professionalism in dialogue with the hair-raisingly inverted world on the playing field, where corporeal beings in regulated states perform the exchange of the living into the mechanical. Repetition techniques, canon, refrain, reprise, variation, inversion, overlay, rotation, gradation forms, but above all, diminishing forms are the narrative and dramatic gaits of the minimalist.