Laudatory speech Stückemarkt Commission of Work 2022

Dear audience, dear Stückemarkt team and above all, dear Stückemarkt artists of 2022,

A few days of exciting artworks and lively discussions within the framework of this festival are now behind us.

As a partner theatre, we are especially happy that we had the chance to get to know you in advance in a personal meeting. All your texts and performances have touched us and we would like to thank you for giving us an insight into your work.

As an institution, we consider contemporary texts and performances a crucial component of progressive theatre. They reflect what our everyday lives often obscure. Through them, we can gain a sharper view of our times. That is why a lively and sustainable collaboration with authors and performance artists is perhaps our answer to the question of this year’s motto: What is the future worth (to us)? So we are especially happy to cooperate with a festival in which young artists are made visible and promoted.
Furthermore, we enjoyed meeting the nine of you, to get into conversation with you and to discuss theatre together. Even more on the basis of the works you have brought to us:

There was ruth tang’s “FUTURE WIFE”, which invited us into a seemingly surreal setting along an assembly line, where relationships between women and goats are the only imaginable working social concept. Apart from that, a group of pirates discusses the most reasonable economic and social system. In a complex web of dependencies, oppression and power, this world opens our eyes for the construction of our own. In the view of this fictional society, “FUTURE WIFE” uncovers the absurd mechanisms we accept as normal, or as just the way they are and always have been.  

In “AirSpace or In the Next Century” by Eric Marlin we got to discover a young woman working as a consultant at a company in Romania. She works day in and out while her girlfriend is waiting for her at home, and her mother is calling her constantly on the phone. On top of that, cooperating with the new colleagues is also pretty difficult. We discover a fragile social scenario. In it’s way it is a logical outcome of an international market, which takes a life of it’s own, nourished by the people that maintain it. In rapid dialogues, the characters in the play confront their particular expectations, only to give way to a breathless, all-consuming silence in the next moment.

We experienced the performance circle Hasu by Aine Nakamura. In “Circle Hasu We plant seeds in the spring of mountains” she impressively switches between her Japanese and American identity. In fact the cultural split of the two identities is constitutional for her minimalistic, contemplative yet intense performance on stage. It is astonishing how deep the simple lines of her storytelling took us into the alienations of an Asian woman in New York. And the elegance of her choreography up into the tips of her fingers provide a glimpse into the rich traditions of Japanese dance. Along with her short performative interventions, Aine Nakamura transformed the space in front of the Haus der Berliner Festspiele into a sacral landscape in which every detail suddenly became important and a little stone was valued equally to a vulnerable and fragile living existence.

The story of Amanda Wilkin’s “And I dreamt I was drowning” managed to capture the tension between a specific story and its universal applicability. It tells a story about the need to escape when individuals are no longer considered or included by a system. Alongside a young couple, we experienced what it means to leave the past behind facing an uncertain future. We also saw how territorial borders are perpetuated in interpersonal relationships while threatening to tear them apart.

The performance by Kolektiv Igralke from Rijeka, together with the Slovenian director Tjaša Črnigoj, introduced us to the Croation pension system and the hardships of four elderly women who can only survive by collecting empty bottles in the streets of Rijeka. The energy, the enthusiasm and the esprit of the collective’s four actors on stage is breathtaking and heartwarming at the same time – quite the opposite to the rather difficult and frustrating theme of the show. On top of that, we experienced a visually powerful introduction to the Buddhist spirituality of PET bottles, which was new to us. We would definitely love to see these kinds of contradictions performed this joyfully on stage more often!

What is the future worth to us? And who is going to design and frame it? In these five different pieces of work, we are able to experience different perspectives and assumptions on what we might have to deal with in the future. At the same time, we always try to answer the question of what is yet to come in the context of what has passed. 

At Schauspiel Leipzig, we have a special history as being part of a region that belonged once to the GDR. And we make theatre for an audience where many have gone through this system change. Suddenly these people started to live in another country without even having changed their location. Most people are grateful for these developments – and not a small number of people really pushed history into this way, by demonstrations that took place over months. But also not a small number of people has the feeling that they now live in a country they hardly identify with. These debates have been a constant companion and an ongoing struggle for the people in the city as well as for us in the theatre.

At the same time, we have currently been experiencing that national borders are being questioned and shifted. That a political agenda claims places and takes them away from the local people.

The handling of a phenomenon like this is not easy. Neither is the decision we have to make within this cooperation, which is to name one of you for a joint project. Five powerful and impressive works have been part of the Stückemarkt. At the same time, there is one among them that has particularly impressed us in the way it deals with its topic. The sensitivity with which it tells of human destinies and the bluntness with which it looks at the wounds of time.
We see this sensitive stage language as an enrichment and a new facet in the repertoire of Diskothek, our venue for new drama. Therefore we would like to invite you, Amanda Wilkin, to work with us in a joint project. And we would be very happy if you would accept our invitation.

Also, Schauspiel Leipzig would like to thank all the artists for their great work and also the Stückemarkt team for giving us the opportunity for this cooperation!