Isabell Antonia Höckel

The author and musician PeterLicht frees this moral portrait that we now find barely legible from the socio-political reality of French absolutism and sets his sights on the present in his new version «Tartuffe or the Philosopher’s Swine». Here he employs the same characters as the original, whose literary descendants are nevertheless given considerable licence: in secular times one abhors a vacuum and so the «socially interconnected sculpture» hopes for and fears the appearance of Tartuffe, who serves to supply their wishes and as a surface onto which they may project themselves.

In «Archive of Tears» Magdalena Schrefel invents a commemorative space that preserves the most fleeting signs of human feelings – tears. This universal, human, salty secretion that leaks from the organs of our sight, the eyes, seems to combine the body and emotion, the mind and chemistry in an almost alchemical fashion: feelings – of movement, grief or joy – are translated into a physical language.

In the two volumes of poetry that were published before her early death, May Ayim finds a concise, poetic language with which she processes her experiences of racism and lack of understanding alongside her childhood and her desire for love, her joy and her sadness. She plays with sounds, methods of writing and letters, and yet always finds very clear words for what needs to change in Germany.

«Peer, you’re lying!»: Henrik Ibsen immediately highlights the key theme of his dramatic poem  in its opening line – the blurred boundary between illusion and reality. Because Peer, whose youth is shaped by the poverty of his farming background, continually reinvents himself with the aid of stories, lies and the arts of fabulation – as a cosmopolitan, a colonial master and even an Emperor.

In her new work, the director Claudia Bauer, who has been invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen four times and is renowned for her work with fast and furious acting ensembles, now tackles someone who typifies Munich, the brilliant comedian Karl Valentin. In her usual, opulent stage language she will devise a homage to the Bavarian whose anarchic approach to language led the critic Alfred Kerr to invent the term «Wortzerklauberer», someone who steals words and tears them to pieces.