Munich — At the end of a recent performance “Bad road” Here, we thank the audience for the Ukrainian director of the play, Tamara Tornova, for staying in the entire 180-minute production of a disastrous series of vignettes set in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. War with Ukraine.
“It’s much easier to drink a glass of wine than to watch our play,” Tornova said from the stage of the Munich People’s Theater, where “Bad Road” opened this year. Radical Jung (Radical Young) Festival, showcase of annual works by up-and-coming directors.
The previously scheduled two installments of Radikal Jung have been canceled due to a pandemic. Beginning June 26th and continuing this Saturday, this year’s edition will be the first edition to be held at the brand new home of the Volkstheater, a gorgeous performing arts complex in the former slaughterhouse.
While the festival has traditionally focused on German-speaking theater, this year’s 11-drama lineup was very international. The expanded geographic perspective seemed to recognize the artistic affinity between the work of young German theater producers and the corresponding theater producers in Greece, London and Paris. All but one of their works was a recently written drama, which seemed to reflect a desire to tell a new story, especially addressing contemporary concerns. Many of today’s serious problems, such as pandemics, gender and sexuality debates, pop culture and social media ubiquity, wartime life and climate change, have appeared in various Radical Jung works.
The “bad road” is torn apart in a powerful lineup featuring Goethe’s innovative digital rework of “The Sorrows of Young Wertel” and a brilliantly performed one-woman show about Britney Spears. It was not only the one that was good, but also the one that stood out. Immediateness of the headline.
Ukrainian writer Natalia Borosbit is based on a play entitled “Six Stories about Love and War,” based primarily on reports collected while traveling through the battlefields of eastern Ukraine. Earlier versions of “Bad Roads” were staged in English at the Royal Court Theater in London in 2017. Trunova’s work premiered at the Left Bank Theater in Kieu in 2019 (the film version directed by Vorozhbit was the official Ukrainian entry to the 2022 Academy Awards).
Dozens of actors vividly remind us of Volozbitt’s nightmare story on a stage dominated by a giant fence. Hallucinogens, often ridiculous, they alternate between savage cruel and ridiculous Quarteyians. In the opening narrative, journalists on a fact-finding mission in Donbus will write an identification body mark, such as a mole or tattoo, on the application form before entering the area in case they are killed during the mission. is needed.
The reporter who led us to the war zone seems to be a substitute for the playwright, telling a long monologue that combines poetry and poetry. She talks about her suffering she finds and her conflicting sexual appeal towards the soldiers who guide her. “You’re not just a Brad Pitt look-alike,” she says. “You really killed others.”
This introductory story sets the moral ambiguity of the story that follows. There, ordinary people whose lives have been robbed by meaningless conflicts are extremely driven.
Even if the Medic carrying the corpse of his lover is shot through with morbid humor, such as when he proposes a soldier to accompany him on a mission, the work is mercilessly dark and barbaric. The bag doesn’t turn me on. “
It can be difficult to determine who is on which side, at least for this non-Russian and Ukrainian viewer. (The performance had German subtitles). The confusing atmosphere reminded me of Sergei Loznitsa’s extraordinary movie “Donbass”. This is another anthology of a surreal episode about the 2014 conflict. At the same time, Vorozhbit’s sensitivity to the psychology of her character, and her desire to even understand the perspective of a violent perpetrator, is a compromise needed to survive Bad Roads in an inhuman era. , Cunning, and a deeply human work about complete blind luck.
It was almost reassuring to leave the real horror of “Bad Roads” for the immersive dystopia of “Bad Roads”.Gym, “High School Opera” written and directed by Bon Park in Ben Wrestler’s music. It is the only Volkstheater production at Radikal Jung and is very likely to be the most loopy and most entertaining German production premiered last year. Set in a bizarre mashup of the late Middle Ages and the 1990s, the show is a flashy and noisy transmission of movies such as “Carry,” “Heathers,” and “Clueless,” who are willing to enjoy the myths of American high school. is.
Replaced by quirky settings, teen comedy stock characters and plot devices provide parks and wrestlers with enough fuel to distort our off-quilter world. Tribalism, feudalism, and superstition are one of the medieval norms revived in the “post-truth” digital era. The Gymnasium, with its terribly sung numbers and stunningly colorful sets and costumes, with a gentle satirical touch, comments on trolling, viral rumors, and skepticism about climate change.
Hand-painted sets, low-budget special effects such as active volcanoes approaching the school, and the violent and energetic performances of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra Academy (certified as a cheerleader orchestra) will help you create a “gymnasium” at your school. Was great enough, or senior play hoping your classmates are talented enough.
The “gymnasium” built the world of Sui Generis from historical and pop culture references, “We are in the army now.” Greek director Elias Adam has rushed the audience into the world of digital theater, primarily to investigate Generation Z’s hopes, anxieties and turmoil.
First announced as part of an online theater festival held by Onassis Foundation-Stegi In Athens, this unclassifiable show is a social media yose where four fearless young performers scream at Cybervoid and expose their souls (and much of their skin).
Their tools of self-expression are TikTok and Instagram, and while much of the live performance is captured on the performer’s smartphone or computer and projected behind the stage, their dissatisfaction is hill-old and to their parents. I’m furious. Unhappy love, powerlessness to change the world that refuses to accept it. Their autobiographical monologues are performed with ferocious energy and physicality, instead empowering with sorrow. At the enthusiastic finale, the actors engage in several Kick-Ass cosplays and fight their own self-destructive tendencies as patriarchal and glam rock power rangers.
Our world and the people in it need to be seriously organized. Innovative work at Radikal Jung suggested that theater helps unravel things by fostering a greater sense of solidarity with the victims of complex repressive systems. As an actor in “We Are in the Army Now,” he states, “I can’t use emoji to explain ideology.”
Radical Jung
Until Saturday at the Munich People’s Theater. muenchner-volkstheater.de..
