Stolpersteine Staatstheater
In the documentary theatre performance “Stolpersteine Staatstheater”, director Hans-Werner Kroesinger and dramaturg Regine Dura approach a dark chapter in the history of Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, reviewing many layers in the discrimination of Jewish employees of the theatre during the Nazi-regime.
Hans-Werner Kroesinger /Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe
STOLPERSTEINE STAATSTHEATER
December 16, 2017 at 16.00 and 20.00 (The show at 16.00 is sold out!)
Riga, Dailes theatre small stage, Brīvības iela 75
Duration 2h, no interval
In German with Latvian translation
Director Hans-Werner Kroesinger
Text by Regine Dura
With Veronika Bachfischer, Antonia Mohr, Jonathan Bruckmeier, Gunnar Schmidt
Stage, costume & video design: Rob Moonen
Music: Daniel Dorsch
Artistic associate Regine Dura
Dramaturg Annalena Schott
Tickets 15 eur (reduced price 10 eur for students, pupils, seniors, people with disabilities) on sale at Biļešu paradīze ticket outlets and www.bilesuparadize.lv
Using staff records of Staatstheater Karlsruhe, director Hans-Werner Kroesinger and dramaturg Regine Dura reconstruct the process of anti-Semitic discrimination and the dismissal of the theatre’s Jewish artists after 1933. Actors and audience sit together at a large work desk. The actors read from files, newspaper reports, memoirs and interviews with contemporary witnesses. Repeatedly, they transition into brief passages of acting. We hear how in Karlsruhe, Jewish actors were dismissed, arrested, driven into exile and to suicide. Gradually the production turns into a lesson about the impartial operation of a state bureaucracy.
The title Stolpersteine refers to an art project by German artist Gunter Demnig which “commemorates the victims of national socialism, keeping alive the memory of all Jews, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, dissidents, Jehovah’s witnesses and victims of euthanasia who were deported and exterminated”. “Stolpersteine” (tripping stones or stumbling blocks) are cobblestone-sized and carry an engraved brass plate that shows the name and biographical facts of the person it commemorates. Usually Demnig inserts the Stolperstein into the pavement surface right in front of the last self-chosen home of the victim.
In Karlsruhe we find two Stolpersteine in front of the building of the Staatstheater in memory of two actors that were part of the theatre’s company in 1933.
Info on Stolpersteine Staatstheater (in German):Goethe-Institut Riga
Hans-Werner Kroesinger is one of the most important figures in contemporary documentary theatre. He studied drama, theatre and media in Gießen from 1983 to 1988 and while still a student, began working as an assistant director and dramaturg for Robert Wilson. Later he also worked on a production by Heiner Müller.
Since 1993 Kroesinger has directed his own interdisciplinary projects, which include performances, installations, drama and music theatre productions, at Staatsoper Stuttgart, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin, Staatstheater Karlsruhe, HAU / Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, Theater Augsburg, Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, the Forum Freies Theater (FFT) in Düsseldorf, the Festival Theatre at Dresden-Hellerau and the Theaterhaus Gessnerallee in Zürich, among others. In 2009, Rwanda Revisited, a production about the genocide in Rwanda, was included in the prestigious Impulse Festival.
The guest performance in Riga is organised by the New Theatre Institute of Latvia in co-operation with Goethe-Institute Riga. The project is made possible with the support of Federal Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany.
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