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T h e...C I R C L E S...S E L E C T I O N |
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Sterijino Pozorje Festival |
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Novi Sad |
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May 26th - June 5th 2008 |
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SATURDAY - MAY 31st 2008 |
Grand Stage, Serbian National Theatre |
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21:30 |
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SUNDAY - JUNE 1st 2008 |
Grand Stage, Serbian National Theatre |
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20:00 |
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1977 (Sympathisers / Seven Young Kids / Hamletmachine)
Staatstheater Stuttgart – Schauspielhaus, Stuttgart (Germany) |
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Direction
STEPHAN KIMMIG
Music MICHAEL VERHOVEC
Video ROBERT SEIDEL
Dramaturge KEKKE SCHMIDT
Assistant do director
MAREN WAFFENSCHMID
Assistant to set designer MATTHIAS KOCH
Assistant to costume designer
LEAH LICHTWITZ
Premiere:
October 10th 2007
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Cast |
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SILjA BÄCHLI |
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KATJA BÜRKLE |
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ISTVAN RACZ |
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MICHAEL VERHOVEC |
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P E R F O R M A N C E...... |
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1977: Heiner Müller writes his Hamletmachine; the ‘Landshut’ hijacking (on 13th October 1977 Lufthansa’s Boeing 737 was hijacked by members of the RAF, commonly known as the ‘Landshut’ hijacking-translators note) escalates the ‘German Autumn’; a girl in her mother’s womb feels the turbulences of the time. Thirty years later, as a young actress, in a knight’s attire, she enthusiastically works on the stage consumed with deconstructing Müller’s Hamletmachine: a tattered family album of killed fathers, incestuous mothers and raped women; on the margins of the battle, an intellectual incapable of action. Together with this, a fairytale about a bad wolf, punk, seduction, percussions and music: a gentle-wild last verse on a past time.
At the beginning of Kimmig’s drama about the RAF, we can see young actress Katja Bürkle, with her wild, very interesting, Indian-like facial features, crawling around a camping tent while a camera follows her. The tent is meant to be a symbol of the uterus of Katja Bürkle’s mother, as the actress was not yet born in the autumn of 1977. With a dose of surprise, her tale of the events of the time of terror sounds like an endlessly distant dreadful story. The lesson on the innocence of those who were born later, Kimmig continues with a real fairytale about ‘the wolf and seven young kids’ and then he goes on to tell Hamletmachine as a manifesto of the virtue of terrorism and boastful German poetry. But the strongest impression is given by a short text, a look back, spoken into the microphone by actress Silja Bächli: in a cry against the paternal generation, the RAF terrorists came up with nothing better than hatred for those who Hitler’s Germany hated most – Jews and Americans. That is Kimmig’s lesson on guilt. Besides Stuttgart and his project, The Last Stop Steinheim, other German theatres commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of the German Autumn as well.
Three weeks in the autumn Project
Thirty years stood in the center of Stuttgart of the German and international public opinion. The RAF (Rote Army Fraction) processes in Stammheim, the abductions and killings of General Office of the Attorney, suicide of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Raspe were the culmination of a spiral of violence, which Federal shook.
The killings, perpetrated by the so-called second generation of the RAF, referred repeatedly to Stammheim as germ cell of the violence. In fast-track legislation has been adopted to contact the RAF prisoners among themselves and with the outside world and testosterone. The terrorists even spoke of isolation torture. The country was divided. War is already a sympathizer, if the legality of government actions anzweifelte? Was the RAF the result of insufficient reappraisal of the Nazi dictatorship? Marked fall of 1977, perhaps until the end of the post-war period, but the latest move by the 68ers seemed to be washed away? How much the RAF was part of an international terrorist movement, and how far do the connections of the terror of the '70s to the preset? IS politically motivated resistance to minorities only by the use of force on media and so politically effective?
The ACTING STTUTGART, together with partners from the city and the region, with artists from throughout the Federal Republic of these issue. In one project week in September, October and November, with the very different aesthetics for us today kea aspects of the "RAF complex" artistic quoestioned.The performances will be accompanied by discussion forums, film documentaries and exhibition projects. The Schauspielhaus becomes a multiple stage, the teams set in a single room structure their productions. |
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S E L E C T O R ' S...R E P O R T...... |
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Concurrently with the 53rd Sterijino Pozorje Festival, in the early days of summer, it will be exactly forty years since the student protests and other turbulent political events that marked the already historical year of 1968. Besides the social turmoil caused by this movement all around the world, as well as in former Yugoslavia, it also had a significant impact on the art of that time, theatre in particular. Some of the most important local Yugoslav reflections of 1968 were recorded, among other places, in Sterijino Pozorje, causing an adequate aesthetical and ideological turbulence. Today, forty years later, the Berlin Wall has fallen, Europe has united, Yugoslavia has disintegrated; in our country the burdensome decade of the civil war is now behind us, and the decade of slow and unfinished democratisation of the society and economic transition is near its end. Our theatre after October 5 is only just timidly starting to grapple with the social and political problems of the post-Milosevic Serbia, and the socialist past of this country is a special kind of taboo: it is being treated superficially only as a dark dictatorship, without a need for critical and dialectical insight and possible recognition of elements of its positive heritage. In such a context, the treatment of the 1968 revisionist or leftist movement is equally inadequate.
The situation is such in our theatre, but not in the European as well: the programme of the Circles is, therefore, dedicated to problematising the leftist legacy of 1986, both on the level of topics and theatrical language. The questions raised by this year’s Circles are: how do we see 1968 today and all that has emerged from it in the political sense? Is a radical political change based on progressive ideas possible today? Is there any aesthetic heritage of that period present in contemporary theatre?
Ivan MEDENICA |
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STEPHAN KIMMIG
(b. in Stuttgart) is one of the leading German theatre directors. After his first works in Holland and Belgium, his productions at the Schauspielhaus Staatstheater of Stuttgart won him a wider recognition outside the region (among others Caligula by Albert Camus, Above Life by Judith Herzberg and Thyestes by Hugo Claus and Seneca, the latter invited to the 2002 Berlin Theatre Meeting). Since 2000 he has been a permanent director at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg, where he has directed Hedda Gabler byHenrik Ibsen, Buddenbrooks after the novel by Thomas Mann and Penthesilea by Heinrich von Kleist (as a co-production with the Salzburg Festival). His production of Schiller’s Mary Stuart at the Thalia Theatre has received a number of awards and an invitation to the 2008 Berlin Theatre Meetings. Stephan Kimmig has also worked at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, the Münchener Kamerspielen (for example, Faith, Hope and Charity by Ödön von Horváth and Mother Medea by Lenoy) as well as in Burgteater in Vienna where he is currently staging Shakespeare’s The War of Roses (premiere: 29th May 2008). He will be engaged at the Deutsches Theater in 2009 as a permanent director.
The play 1977 is a completely personal Stephan Kimmig’s view of 1977 and he has been commissioned to make for the Schauspielhaus Stuttgart, as part of its project entitled Last Stop Steinheim. |
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... questions for Stephan Kimmig
As a man born in Stuttgart, what are your personal memories of the autumn of 1977?
On the corner of Hauptstätter Street and Wilhelms Square at that time there was a book store. I often went there and bought literary works. We used to live quite close in Dannecker Street. And each time I went in or out of that store, the Security Service, whose seat was at a safe distance, recorded it. So, control, control, fear, anxiety.
To a certain extent you find your basis in the heated time of those days with Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine. What is the link between Hamletmachine and the RAF terrorist?
The RAF was a gigantic, manically obsessive, bitterly failed undertaking. And Heiner Müller in his text deals with the exploration of the rigid and ungraceful fixation on a certain, one and only, position in political context. Only ONE position should be found; always only the one position that we seemingly have to comply with, in our petit bourgeois and fearful manner. According to Müller, the exploration takes place in 1977, in both Western and Eastern Europe. It can be felt in the text that there is already someone moving between the borders, knowing both sides, and the Wall is to fall twelve years later. |
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.The
management preserves the right to change
the schedule
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Copyright
: Sterijino pozorje 1998-2008.
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