Westflügel Sessions
3 days of rehearsals, 1 performance!
In 2015, Westflügel Leipzig was awarded the Theatre Prize of the Federal Government. The prize money made the production of the Westflügel Sessions possible. The concept: 3 days of rehearsals, 1 performance! Four works were created with Miriam Goldschmidt and Anne Tismer, among others.
Westflügel Session #1: Kleist – Unwahrscheinliche Wahrhaftigkeiten
“Three stories,” said an old officer in a company, “are of such a nature that, though I myself give them perfect credence, I should nevertheless run the risk of being thought a windbag if I tried to tell them. For people demand, as a first condition, of truth that it be probable; and yet probability, as experience teaches, is not always on the side of truth.“
An experiment – Heinrich von Kleist‘s “little” texts with an actress and a puppeteer in the presence of the audience, all brought together at one table. From the texts peels the miniaturized world, largely unknown, succinct and anecdotal. The subject of investigation is the difference of blow and feint, with the participation of a fencing bear, a bomb mail machine and an airship.
25. November 2015.
Directed by: Antonia Christl, Hendrik Mannes
Performance: Miriam Goldschmidt, Michael Vogel
Westflügel Session #2: Songs from the graveyard
The graveyard, the scene of nocturnal ghost stories or absurd daytime mundanity, is fertile ground (!) for numerous literary episodes, encounters, reflections. Nowhere is the finiteness of life so visible and almost tangible as when walking among the graves and in the face of names of the deceased carved in stone.
The puppeteer Michael Vogel and the musicians Charlotte Wilde and Johannes Frisch repeatedly work on a song program with figures on the theme of death, which, like the musical models, mourns, welcomes or also ridicules finitude, between rehearsals and performances for joint productions such as Songs for Alice and Lear. Well-known to Leipzig audiences from Lear is actor Frank Schneider, who enriches the ensemble for this session as a performer of scenes from literature and drama set in cemeteries. On the brass side, the evening is completed by trumpeter Konrad Schreiter.
14. May 2016.
Dramaturgy: Fiona Ebner
Texts: Frank Schneider
Performance, Puppets: Michael Vogel
Violin, Guitar: Charlotte Wilde
Double bass: Johannes Frisch
Trumpet: Konrad Schreiter
Westflügel Session #3: Kleist. Shortcuts. Die Familie Schroffenstein
“Since the whole is nothing but a wish, the imagination has its unrestricted
scope, and may not bind itself to any fetters of reality.” Heinrich von Kleist
For this evening, the actress Anne Tismer and the puppeteer Michael Vogel go to the table with the early work of Heinrich von Kleist. First, they rummage through Kleist’s unabashed letters to his fiancée Wilhelmine von Zenge and his sister Ulrike von Kleist. From there, they playfully plunge into Kleist’s dramatic first novel. “Do me a favor and do not read the book. … It is a miserable Scharteke.” Together, they unravel the comic, tragic and unspeakable tenderloins from the Schroffenstein Family.
24. August 2016.
Directed by: Antonia Christl, Hendrik Mannes
Performance: Anne Tismer und Michael Vogel
Westflügel Session #4: Shortcuts. Penthesilea. Heinrich v. Kleist
“The step no longer forwards, no longer backwards dares;/Women’s cries of fear circle through the air:/Suddenly she falls, horse and rider,/Surrounded by loosening rock,/As if she were leading into the Orkus, smashing/Back to the rock’s deepest foot,/And does not break her neck nor learn anything:/She merely pulls herself together to climb again.“
This evening is an encounter between the dancer Marina Tenório and the puppeteer Michael Vogel and an approach to Kleist’s work beyond language. An attempt to grasp the inexpressible in it through another form, from body, from space. Together they dedicate themselves to one of the central motifs from Penthesilea: the moment of falling, of falling.
18. January 2017.
Directed by: Hendrik Mannes
Dramaturgy, Co-direction: Antonia Christl
Puppets, Performance: Michael Vogel
Dance: Marina Tenório
(photos Thilo Neubacher, ?)
You are in the archive part of our website, we are no longer performing this play. However, you may be interested in our current repertoire or you may simply want to get in touch with us.