Organizer: Thalia Theater GmbH
There is probably no greater theme than life itself: as a subject for a festival, it is as self-evident as it is impossible at the same time. Nevertheless, this is the first edition of the Lessingtage after a period in which our coexistence has changed fundamentally. Although people were and are affected by the pandemic in the most diverse ways, isolation and finitude were even more in the foreground everywhere than usual. This festival is intended to counteract this: “Celebration of Life” is intended to give expression to the now so important and pressing need for the joy of life. Celebrating life with art!
The festival opens with a focus on the politically persecuted Russian “Gesamtkunstwerker” Kirill Serebrennikov: with “The Black Monk”, he stages a world premiere of a Chekhov text about man’s irrepressible longing for life. Immediately afterwards, he takes us on a furious ride through baroque music and political protest in “Barocco”, a guest performance by the Gogol Center. His cinema film “Leto” will also be presented. The festival speech will be given by Nino Haratischwili. Born in Tbilisi, she is a true border crosser and one of the most idiosyncratic, powerful and fearless voices in contemporary German-language literature.
“Celebration of Life” is also often used in the English-speaking world to refer to a funeral service. In this sense, the fragility of life is addressed and productions are shown in which extreme life designs are played out: In “The Life of Vernon Subutex 1”, director Thomas Ostermeier lets his protagonist Joachim Meyerhoff painfully experience the abysses of a society marked by social disintegration. The dazzling Danish artist Madame Nielsen, on the other hand, shows us our contradictions in “Die Welterlöserin” when it comes to questioning our own way of life: “She knows she shouldn’t buy food that has to be transported here by plane, but, oh, avocado is supposed to be sooo healthy, and she of all people needs healthy fat!” The relationship between life and the environment is also the theme of the multi-award-winning performance by the Belgian performance collective Ontroerend Goed – they illustrate the reversibility of things after the point of no return in terms of content and form: “Are we not drawn onward to new erA” (read it backwards!). Or it is about the radical desire to change the form of life completely right away: A sheep wants to become a human being and in “The Sheep Song” by the Flemish collective FC Bergman suffers all the experiences of powerlessness that also pervade human existence in touchingly poetic imagery. The finiteness of life and what comes after is the theme of the “Long Night of the World’s Religions”, which asks: “Immortality: Dream or Nightmare?
A blueprint for life after the pandemic is made by Toshiki Okada in “Doughnuts”. The exceptional Japanese artist opens the festival with his first production at the Thalia Theatre in Gaußstraße, presenting the second in-house production by an international director at the beginning of the festival. A cautious, joyful “re-approach” to life on stage is also undertaken by the Italian company Deflorian/Tagliarini, who are present in Germany for the first time with their homage to Fellini’s “Ginger e Fred”.
The festival ends with a hopeful “Have a good day!”, the thousandfold farewell to the cashiers who were applauded as systemically relevant just a few months ago. The banality of this phrase, title of the Lithuanian musical performance, becomes the condensation of one of the feelings that remain, in the – hopefully – last burst of the pandemic. The effects of this latest catastrophe, which in the face of climate change and other challenges is just another one among many, will be with us for a long time. But we can begin now to perceive the structures that determine our lives as changeable (especially in a good sense). Or to say it with Kirill Serebrennikov: “Every day is an empty stage”.
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