The Sensitivity of Giants

Come and see what you have never seen before! Cast a look at our iridescent and playful embodiment of unfathomable genius. Let us all follow the muses and spirits and ask them how it is possible, that they bless some of us with such generous gifts but don’t lift the rest of us to those heights. For we all want to be elevated, we all want to be brilliant.

Borne by the master Johann Sebastian Bach we rush past Dr. Sigmund Freud‘s psychoanalysis to the horrible machinery of war invented by Leonardo da Vinci. It, ego and superego unite in a tragicomic dance. But where does genius reside?

In their third joint production Christoph Bochdansky and Wilde&Vogel stage the human search and fascination for genius. They go on a theatrical road trip: departure stage – final destination hell. The fly wheel driving this theatre machine is Freud’s study dating from 1910: Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood, which he once described as “the only pretty thing” he ever wrote. In this study he analyses Leonardo and explains the origins of his scientific curiosity, his plans for flying machines and Mona Lisa’s smile.

“O sleepers! what a thing is slumber! Sleep resembles death. Ah, why then dost thou not work in such wise as that after death thou mayst retain a resemblance to perfect life, when, during life, thou art in sleep so like to the hapless dead?“
(Leonardo da Vinci)

“At bottom no one believes in his own death, which amounts to saying: in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his immortality.“
(S. Freud)