co-production by TATWERK and Berliner Ringtheater
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“They thought I’d been shot to death. But there I was: a failed suicide in Berlin. Capital of the failed suicides. A place you might go and truly die while remaining forever alive. This entire city is full of ghosts in case you’ve never noticed?”
In 1919, just months after the Russian Revolution and the failed German Revolution, the executed body of the Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg was dumped unceremoniously in the Landwehr Canal in Berlin’s city center. One year later, a woman would attempt to end her life by jumping off the Bendlerstrasse bridge into the same canal. Rescued and sent to a mental institution where she refused to give her identity, she was known for a time only as Fräulein Unbekannt – until launching a new career in which she claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, having somehow managed to survive the assassinations of the Russian Revolution…
In this wildly imaginative work, the ghosts of these two enigmatic historical figures are joined by a worker ant having been separated from her school. Left to wander through a Berlin suspended in time between two centuries, with the Landwehr Canal emerging as a symbolic division between the land of the living and the dead, as well as an excavation point for Berlin’s psychogeography, this multi-disciplinary work combines the anarchic linguistic inventiveness of Travis Jeppesen’s writing with dance, sound and video art, all under the direction of Taiwanese theater maverick Wang Ping-Hsiang.
Ghosts of the Landwehr Canal was site-specifically created for Berliner Ringtheater’s current interim location: the ex-industrial production sheds at Alte Münze, a historical coin production facility right by the banks of river Spree in the very historical heart of Berlin.
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Author: Travis Jeppesen | Director: Wang Ping-Hsiang | Performers: Moritz Sauer (Rosa Luxemburg), Wu Po-Fu (Fräulein Unbekannt), Tien Yi-Wei (Worker Ant) | Sound Designer: Shen Sum-Sum | Stage and Costume Designer: Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo | Lighting Designer and Technical Director: Raquel Roslidete | Video and Graphic Designer: Lin Yu-En | Sound Engineer: Ilya Selikhov | Stage and Costume Assistant: Idil Morsallioglu | Vocal Coach：Keith Wong | Production management: Michael Rade | Press: Anita Goß
A co-production of TATWERK and Berliner Ringtheater.
Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the program NEUSTART KULTUR and National Culture and Arts Foundation Taiwan. Mediapartner is TAZ. Die Tageszeitung.
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Location:
Berliner Ringtheater
auf dem Gelände der Alten Münze
Am Krögel 2 /10179 Berlin
Dates:
Sunday, 2. April – 08:00 pm
Monday 3. April - 08:00 pm
Tuesday, 4. April - 08:00 pm
Wednesday, 5. April - 08:00 pm
Language: English, Chinese - Subtitle: English, German
Duration: 60 mins
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Downloads:
Review
Spring of the Undead
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essay by Daniel Moldoveanu, published on SPIKE Art Magazine (06/2023)
Jeppesen’s characters’ main source of frustration springs from their enforced oscillation between a hyper-manic camp of the living and a similarly chaotic realm of the dead.
As they fail to urinate and deflect their labor value into cam-sex chatbots, the trio reflects upon capitalism’s tendency to self-annihilate, failed Marxist revolutions, and their interrelated personal origins, weaving satire together with figurative and literal histories. They blame one another, then themselves, then identity and class, emancipating from the former, breaking allegiances on grounds of the latter, gesticulating with found dildos in increasingly inventive anarchic grabs. Alive enough to be burdened by guilt, dead enough to be incapable of backpaddling change, conflicted between revolution and self-indulgence, each narrative floats around like a DVD-screensaver logo, jumping directions and colors every time it bumps into the hard edge of yet another frame.
Berliner Ringtheater: Geisterspiele
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review by Sophie-Margarete Schuster, published on Theater der Zeit
Theater & Erinnerung – Gedächtnistheater – Wie die Vergangenheit spielt (05/2023)
Between these strange open ends, however, glimpses of noteworthy moments of political reflection emerge in the staging of Taiwanese theater maker Wang Ping-Hsiang. These moments, embedded fragmentarily in a bizarre mosaic of sexual fantasies, take place within the context of a ghostly time travel to 1920s Berlin. What is on view is an experiment that aligns itself coherently with the artistic and political curiosity of the company's own claim, which is to make "critical theater."
