Online premiere: »Chöre des Spekulativen«

Akademie Schloss Solitude is pleased to announce an event by Heizhaus / PSR, Uferstudio Berlin and FWT Cologne, in which several former fellows will participate: The dramaturgy of the scenic installation »Chöre des Spekulativen« (»Choirs of the Speculative«) is by Dirk Baumann (Marie Zimmermann fellow, December 2019 and August 2020); a featured text on Antigone is by Ebru Nihan Celkan (Jean Jacques Rousseau fellow, January to March 2019).

The online premiere is scheduled for April 23, 2021 at 7 pm. It will be shown free of charge on the Heizhaus/PSR website. Registration is not necessary.

What would the choir have to say today?

In ancient drama, the choir was central to the theater – in dramas and performances, it usually found its place between the protagonists and the audience. With the development of theater in modern times, it disappeared from the stages and with it the voice that commented and contextualized, or – as Roland Barthes writes – the »questioning element.« »Chöre des Spekulativen« asks what the choir would have had to say to the texts and scenes of the modern era, how it would have related to them, had it not been excluded from them: How would he have positioned himself to the theater of the Baroque, to the theater of the Enlightenment, how to the theater of the postwar period? How would he have commented on these scenes, which mostly centered on the individual, how would he have questioned and countered them, how would he have witnessed them? »Chöre des Spekulativen« invites the viewer to encounter a choir that approaches essential stages of theater history in a speculative-retrospective manner. At the same time, the project poses the question of what a form of the choral that is relevant today might look like: Is the choir always a unity or can it not rather unite diverse positions and perspectives within itself?

The focus is on perspectives of the present, eight authors from Jordan, Brazil, China, Turkey, Morocco, Burkina Faso, Greece and Germany re-perspectivize selected texts and create a decolonial perspective on what we call the ›western canon.‹ In this online version, the camera will act as a spectator’s eye – the online audience can thus mingle with the performers via the camera.

Director: Sebastian Blasius
Space: Mark Lammert
Dramaturgy: Dirk Baumann
Camera & Stream: Jan Voges
PR/Public Relations: Yven Augustin
Assistance: Leonie Hahn
With: Leonard Dick, Alexandra Finder, Fabian Hagen, Maria Helgath, Berit Jentzsch, Brigitta Schirdewahn

With texts by Ebru Nihan Celkan, Amahl Khouri, Paul P. Zoungrana, Karima El Kharraze, deufert + plischke, Zhu Yi, Björn SC Deigner, Antigone Akgün, Sophocles, Henrik Ibsen, Jean Racine, Molière, Samuel Beckett, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schiller a.o.

Supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds, LFDK NRW and the City of Cologne.