Fabian gave his production the ambiguous name of »Exhibition Piece«. The audience is not invited to experience a play in a theatre, but to come to an exhibition. He is not telling the plot of Wagner’s opera, rather he wrings the essence from the model for it (the epic of Tristan that Gottfried von Strassburg left behind in 1210). Tristan covets Isolde, the wife of the ruler, but they can neither show, nor live out their love because they are constantly observed by the court. Fabian says about his work: »My goal is not the production of the plot as in a theatre, but exhibiting the lovers and therefore the human feeling that oversteps order and laws as an aspiration made of society that should be preserved. I’m exhibiting Tristan and Isolde in a glass case: I want the vision and the curse of an immortal love to appear both preserved in it« (conception material 15.05.2001).

The installation consists of a glass case and a keyboard. The audience may put comments, associations and questions into this keyboard. Fabian’s choreographic instrument, the alpha system, allows the dancers to dance the written texts letter for letter. All of the texts entered and also the comments via movement with which the dancers respond are projected on video screen. Words become dance and dance can create answers to questions.

Since Jo Fabian 1988 caused a stir with »Baal« and »Prometheus« at the Poetisches Theater Leipzig, he has been continuously working forming his theatre language: This a theatre of images that loves paradoxes and is staged with precision and brilliance. He has made over 23 productions since the end of the 80’s. Fabian’s works were repeatedly invited to euro-scene. After »Shite Samurai« (1991) and »Whisky & Flags« (1994) there was 1997 »Pax Germania«. Fabian has sounded out the aesthetics of his images to perfection all the way to his last large-scale production »The Dark Side of Time« (2001), an opulent three-part evening. With »tristan and isolde« he is leaving the fourth-wall stage and he is giving up his choreographic instruments. The audience becomes the actor.

The stimulus for this co-production with the Festspielhaus Hellerau was the thought that if the »thinking dancer«, as Fabian says, were to master the alpha system like a virtuoso, this would allow a real and more free form of communication between the actors and the audience on a high artificial level. It remains to be discovered in the artistic event how this (body) motion language is supposed to function.