Cinderella's Dream
(1995)

Cinderella's Dream
November 23, 1995, Dampfzentrale Bern
Solo performance by and with Norbert Klassen

The most memorable moment of Norbert Klassen's solo performance Cinderella's Dream is when the artist, dressed in an evening gown, kneels in front of a garbage can full of rotten kitchen waste. He sticks his head in and shouts: "Little tree, little tree, shake yourself! Little tree, little tree, shake yourself! Throw gold and silver over me!" He lifts the barrel until a torrent of garbage splashes over him. The audience makes disgusted noises. Klassen puts the garbage can down next to him and, sitting in the garbage, continues his story of Cinderella.
In a conversation with Gisela Hochuli, the artist describes what the story is about: he wanted to trace the career of a woman who starts out trivial, becomes an artist and finally dances on her deathbed. "I found it very interesting," he says, "instead of Cinderella, who goes to the little tree and gets dresses, to create a character who also has her little tree, but all that comes down is shit and she has to dig through the shit. That's her life."
The moment with the dustbin is preceded by various actions in the performance. Klassen first spreads out various props on the stage. He takes off his clothes and, after speaking briefly to the audience, whips his back with a rod. Next, he presents vegetables and fruit (such as cucumbers and melons), which he assigns to either the male or female gender. At this moment, he appears like a teacher, explaining what he also calls a "symbolic transformation" in conversation with Hochuli.
He also performs this transformation on his own body. He puts on a red evening dress and takes on the role of Cinderella, whom he rides into the shit during the course of the performance. Klassen oscillates between the embodiment of the female character and a distanced narrator role. He repeatedly pauses to comment on Cinderella's life decisions or to explain the background to her life. The concentration and dramaturgical consistency are not broken, even when Klassen dances apathetically to an aria in a smelly dress.
"I can't dance," says Klassen about this scene in a conversation with Renée Magaña, "and I know that when I dance, people start to laugh because it looks so funny. So I really put my heart and soul into it and I suffer. But it looks funny to people. And that's the effect I want." The portrait of the self-seeking artist Cinderella is a grotesque. At the same time, the performance is imbued with a seriousness that Klassen emphasizes with a closing quote from Heiner Müller: "In a society of transgression, a person condemned to death - note from me: that's all of us after all - can make his real death a collective experience on stage."

Text: Marcel Bleuler, from "Norbert Klassen, Warum applaudiert ihr nicht?", Stämpfli Verlag AG, Bern, 2015