Recommendation of the Committee

In Humanistää!, the full-length play Aus der Fremde constitutes the narrative framework for a beautiful overabundance of texts by Ernst Jandl. With her eclectic approach, Claudia Bauer endeavors to revive Jandl’s idiom for the stage, both diverse and eminently suitable for the theatre. Using repetitions and shifting meanings, the poet Ernst Jandl labored to make sense of reality. It is therefore only logical that the staging at Volkstheater relies on repetitions and the resulting breaches of perception. In Aus der Fremde, an auto-fictional text about a poet couple, the characters consistently talk in the third person and use only the conjunctive mood. With its masks, wigs and offstage dialogues, Jandl’s text transforms into a strangely impersonal and yet apposite portrayal. As a play within the play, the Volkstheater-production adds the one-act play “die humanisten”: miserable, wailing men, condemned to brute comedy. That Bauer is just as able to strike more quiet notes becomes evident in Deutsches Gedicht. The director intersperses larger text elements with Jandl-passages, staged miniatures that aim to entertain. Humanistää! – a celebration of Jandl.

Reviews

Theater that electrifies in such a way and causes such prolonged rejoicing is rare. The evening is enormously precisely crafted, especially on the textual level, vibrating with musicality, rhythm, energy.

- Ute Baumhackl, Kleine Zeitung

Strong ensemble, rousing sound. Claudia Bauer's Vienna debut is something to be proud of. The Volkstheater almost certainly has a hit on its hands with Humanistää!. Long-lasting cheers.

- Sonja Harter, APA

A breathtaking theatrical immersion in Jandl's playful linguistic cosmos at the Volkstheater!

- A. J. Goldmann, The New York Times

About Humanistää!

Words, rhyme, and music blend seamlessly in this play rehearsed by director Claudia Bauer, in which the actors reproduce the words of poet Ernst Jandl on stage. With masks, wigs, and conversations with the audience off-stage, Jandl's words become an impersonal, yet straightforward portrayal of the heart of each individual.

The play is composed of different segments, "The Humanists", which is about a group of wailing men who put on a barbarian comedy. In the segment "German Poetry," the play clearly demonstrates the director's ability to play a low-key score. Between the textual elements of the grand narrative, the director embellishes fragments of Yandere's essays to create a mini-play staged entirely for pleasure.

Cast

Director: Claudia Bauer

Cast: Elias Eilinghoff, Evi Kehrstephan, Bettina Lieder, Hasti Molavian, Nick Romeo Reimann, Julia Franz Richter, Uwe Rohbeck, Samouil Stoyanov

Lighting Design: Paul Grilj

Costume Design: Andreas Auerbach

Photography: Thomas Barcal

About Claudia Bauer

Claudia Bauer, born in 1966 in Landshut, where she went to school with Thomas Ostermeier and Jens Hillje, is a director.

She studied acting and directing at the Berlin Hochschule für Regie und Schauspielkunst "Ernst Busch". From 1999 to 2004, Bauer was the artistic director of the Theaterhaus Jena. Since then, she has been working as a freelance director. With the Leipzig Peter Richter novel adaptation 89/90 she was invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen for the first time in 2017.

About the Berliner Theatertreffen

The Berliner Theatertreffen is the largest and most important drama festival in the German-speaking area. It is known as the world's three major drama festivals, together with the Festival d'Avignon in France and the Edinburgh International Festival in Britain. Compared with the other two drama festivals, the Berliner Theatertreffen focuses more on the professionalism and experiment of the internal structure of the drama, and the advancement and modernity of the external meaning of the drama. The Berliner Theatertreffen embodies the direction of contemporary society and the highest level of drama.

About About Volkstheater Wien

The Volkstheater in Vienna was founded in 1889 at the request of the citizens of Vienna, amongst them the dramatist Ludwig Anzengruber and the furniture manufacturer Thonet, in order to offer a popular counterweight to the Hofburgtheater. It was erected according to designs by Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer, who attempted to reconcile their plans with historicism.

The founders of this stage had a theatrical stage in mind, in order to expose wider circles of the population of Vienna to classical and modern literature, whilst staging these next to more traditional plays. The theatre follows this tradition even today. New productions of the classics are always in the pipeline, along with regular reinterpretations of works by Ferdinand Raimund and Johann Nestroy and many new plays and reruns. Special attention is given to Austrian playwrights of old and new.