Sometimes you have to take a closer look to spot the big arch. For example this one here in October’s Kammerspiele schedule: A look back shows that director Anna Smolar first examined with her actors in “Hungry Ghosts” how personal traumata are passed on to the next generation. The next day, the Chilean company “La Resentida” dealt with the violent suppression of the 2019 protests in their homeland. The wonderful production “Les statues rêvent aussi” followed, which dealt with colonial art looted. In between evenings on the subject of National Socialism.
The arc? It is a whole series of productions, readings and talks that the Kammerspiele have summarized under “Remembrance as work on the present” since October 22nd. The seven-week project links past and present. Dramaturg Martin Valdés-Stauber formulates one of the key questions as follows: “What can different artistic strategies contribute to memory work?” This week two more artistic approaches are added to answer this question.
The first is the evening “Lurie’s Lyrics” by Julia Wahren and Rudolf Herz on Wednesday, November 16th, which revolves around Boris Lurie and his band “Gewritten, Poemed”. Lurie comes from a Jewish family, was born in Leningrad in 1924 and grew up in Riga. The Nazis took him to a concentration camp and he was liberated in 1945. Lurie emigrated to New York, where he founded the NO!art movement in 1959. He died in New York in 2008. “Written, Poemed” is an art book accompanying the 1999 Boris Lurie exhibition at the Weimar-Buchenwald Memorial. Lurie is considered controversial and non-conformist. His best-known work, a collage, shows a hearse with concentration camp victims, over which Lurie has mounted a pin-up girl who is just taking off her panties. Wahren and Herz now want to bring Lurie’s writings to life in the Kammerspiele. “Lurie’s Lyric” is designed as an “experimental stage production” with compositions by Michael Emanuel Bauer.
The commemorative festival will continue one day later, on Thursday, November 17, with the Ukrainian-German play development “News from the Past”. The production by the award-winning Ukrainian director Stas Zhyrkov deals with the 1930s and 1940s and the relationships and historical connections between Ukraine and Germany at the time. The idea is, “Maybe going back in time will help you better understand the present?”
“News from the Past” was created in cooperation with the concentration camp memorial in Dachau. The starting point of the production is a fictional situation: two actresses and two actors meet to record a radio feature. In doing so, they encounter the problem of how to tell of extreme suffering without reviving it – which brings the production to a core question of the festival.
Lurie’s LyricsPremiere: Wed., Nov. 16, 8 p.m., Therese-Giehse-Halle; News from the PastPremiere: Thursday, Nov. 17, 8 p.m., Werkraum