Die Pflicht glücklich zu sein

Factory is set in the world of Andy Warhol, of Jacques Derrida and Christoph Schlingensief, of reality TV and internet companies, of interactive media and terror. Factory is set in a world where an artist doesn’t try to describe his image of reality, but makes the world an author of his thoughts; in a world where an actor doesn’t play the protagonist of a story, but uses the story for self-display; in a world where the viewer can’t open himself to a work of art without changing it by looking at it. Factory is set in a place where thinking is declared the enemy and the belief in a non-existent world dominates reality.

Since the days of my early childhood I have found joy in turning my playmates' heads and taking the certainty connecting them with reality from them. It was enough for me to blow out the candle for a moment and say a sentence or two, forming a new image together with the darkness, and already I had a hold on everyone.
The stories I told effectively didn’t matter to me; my joy was to have the others at my mercy as soon as they entered the realm of my fantasy. Later, when I was attending convent school, I was always a step ahead of my friends. Even before my ordination to priesthood I managed to convince the church eldest that he would soon kneel before me. When the moment came, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Today I am Bossuet, bishop of Condom. When even the king fell on his knees before me, when even he betrayed himself and his reason for me, I knew: the most vile and violent people are on my side. Yes, I have the whole country in my hands. But I am yet only a side character. Still, sometimes a nightmare wakes me from my sleep. I wake up and I’m alone, utterly alone. On my own in a world that doesn’t believe anything without proof. A world that only is what it is. Father, have I sinned? Or did I fulfil your will? Father? (Announcement Schauspielhaus Zürich)

In front of the stage curtain a woman is sitting in candlelight. In the background, music is playing: “Forever night shade Mary”. The light goes on.
This is how a play could start, but also a movie.
On the stage there is a screen, the movie starts running. It tells the story of five people working in a video store, searching for their own stories.
At the same time, the events in front of the screen take their course. Imi, Tim, Lily and Pat are actors, Lyn is a singer, Jacques is the director.
Together, they develop a play about reality. In the process, they change characters as well as levels of narration and reality.

Adapted for the theatre, inspired by the novella of the same title by Vladislav Vancura (in the translation of Gustav Just)


Bauersima’s Launischer Sommer, a free adaptation of the 1926 novella, is a parable of the ill-advised capitalist who deems stagnation as being moral while at the same time practising a brainless pragmatism he can’t even justify to himself, thus tending to feel guilty instead of self-confident. Eventually, he tries to assure himself through mystical hanky-panky that ethical behaviour and reasonable thinking are not the same and impossible anyway. The play is set in a swimming pool where reality, bliss, love and sexuality are only abstract concepts. The water everyone is bathing in is the contemporary confusion, up until the day when a ropedancer and a glass harpist decide to test their endurance, their mind and their independence in this inhospitable place.

“As if it was a play written by Jean Renoir... delicately atmospheric, with its own poetic humour… serious ease and relaxed concentration…” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)

The stage as a playing field in both senses of the word.
Four people meet on the tennis court for mixed doubles: two siblings and their spouses.
The four are well attuned, the positions are clear: Dede feels neglected by Max and reacts with cutting remarks, mainly directed at Ira. Max thinks too much and still believes life an “impenetrable salad”. For Ed, Dede’s brother, Ira is the only connection to the outside world. And Ira finds the lightness of being in her hip flask.
Suddenly, Xaver appears and disturbs the sensitive relationship balance. He becomes the umpire and subtly comments on the exchange of blows by the four players, until Ira’s racket hits him in the head and he collapses, deathlike.
Under the pressure of the situation, everything speeds up, everyone is now flailing at everyone. Ira’s unexpected confession about her and Max’s past relationship adds extra fuel. Xaver retains consciousness, while Ed starts laughing hysterically and all seems lost.

What Pirandello lets his six actors demand of the author retrospectively, Exil encodes in itself. The story begins with the image of the writing author at her computer, whose disoriented and senseless writing takes the shape of a writer’s block. The genesis of the text is also that of the characters, who convulse because of their author’s block. They suffer from their own aimlessness, they feel too theoretical and, as if at a dramaturgic impasse, they can reflect on themselves as much as the author does, they know they can’t help themselves, just as the author knows that no one can help her. By subconsciously writing details of her immediate surroundings and own actions into the text, letting the sentences of her characters console her occasionally, an intertextuality, transcending the limits of fiction and reality, is formed in the most brilliant parts of the play. This makes our question, of whether the described suicide of the desperate author actually happens, impossible, for the world of her characters is so much her own – an image of her failure and the theory and practice of writing. (Anja Nioduschewski)

In the estate of aging actress Marina von Berg, movie-makers are meeting for a party. It doesn’t stop snowing outside. Inside, Mambo-Kurt is playing shallow and beautiful songs on his organ. Soon it becomes clear: they are snowed in, no one can leave the 70s villa. The occasion for the party is the diva’s last movie, which is supposed to be filmed soon. Unfortunately, director Frankie doesn’t yet have any ideas for it. Then pizza delivery driver Leo, who has been frozen in in front of the house, appears, and he has a surprisingly good idea for a movie plot. But before he’s finished explaining it, the artist comedy becomes a crime story. A criminal who has mingled with the revellers is discovered and reacts by threatening everyone with his revolver. He is overpowered and now the focus is on the movie plot narrator again, who is finally able to finish his curious story of a crazy professor, a youth potion and a big love.

You can see Anna on an erotic website, but also in a Viennese suburban flat, together with Larissa, Sveta, Georgij, Vienna and her mother. You won’t see Anna in Paris, where she always wanted to go, nor in Moscow, where she came from. Instead, you see the medicine student caught in the net of human traffickers and with a mountain of debt. So, she’s looking for freedom somewhere she can forget about her grubby existence: the internet.
There she meets Zed and falls in love with the fictions that give both a shared story. But her cyberlove isn’t as far away as she thinks, and she isn’t as unfamiliar as she thinks to the son of the human trafficker, pimp and house owner.
It’s the day reality and fiction merge, and Zed has to decide how to connect the strands in order not to lose what has grown between the two. It’s New Year’s Eve, and everyone is invited to the emigrant’s party.
Igor Bauersima and Réjane Desvignes cast an unfamiliar glance at the destiny of these people.

Leif loves Helena. Now, it is said she died. Leif can’t believe it. His parents and friends try to convince him of her death. After all, Helena left a farewell note. Leif doesn’t want to believe it. He starts searching for his lover. Disappears. His friends eventually find him in a completely deserted place. Leif seems confused. He’s talking to an invisible person, he’s scaring them. They overpower him and bring him to an institution. But even there, Leif can’t be calmed. He’s hearing Helena’s voice, even seeing her. She’s coming to visit him. With her, he escapes his prison…

One is trained in believing that invisible people only exist in the delusions of the mentally ill. But in “Rage of Life”, this explanation isn’t enough. When the plot increasingly seems to overcome the limits of plausibility and things happen that transcend the human imagination, it happens on purpose. Maybe Helena is real and alive, and the living dead are the ones denying her existence? In the end Helena, whether dead or alive, turns out to be the incorporation of a happy, fulfilled and proud life without compromises. She is what the rage of life at the beginning of our existence wants us all to become: FREE.

The opera The Rage of Life was first performed on 12.11.2010 at the Staatsoper Stuttgart in co-production with De Vlaamse Opera Antwerpen and Gent. Igor Bauersima adapted the libretto into a play.

“Fred and Lea, he a ... writer, she an actress, ... like each other so much that they bear the tight circumstances in their one-room-production-eat-in-kitchen-toilet… with composure and are incorruptible even for the most lucrative idiotic offers by the television industry. That is until the appearance of Tiger, Lea’s old friend, who has made a successful living as a hip artist on the west coast and is a true work of art himself: his body is completely covered in tattoos, the newest, close to his belly button, is still oozing. In her drunken joy at seeing him again, Lea gives her old love a fateful promise: if he should die… she will take care of the mummified body, tend to it and dust it. Soon after, Tiger dies during an art performance, the plasticised tattoo-corpse moves into the one-room-shack and puts the morally superior couple to a hard test…
A lot of theatres will have a go at Tattoo. Hopefully.” (Theater heute)

“Cash versus class. Market versus morals. The seeming versus the real. Video versus reality. Desvignes and Bauersima have written a loud satire about the art scene that, while piling on and being absolutely crazy, manages to compete as an alternative counterpoint with Yasmina Reza’s comedy ‘Art’.” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)
“Tattoo catches you off guard with its morbid wittiness, humour and irony. It’s an exciting, cheeky, refreshing play about the coolness of youthful non-commitments and commitments, as unrestrained and naïve as it is.” (Saarbrücker Zeitung)

In an age when people can reproduce using technology, Pop Art will reach perfection as Population Art. Future Deluxe deals with loss of identity and individuality and with the threat to our existence posed by the consequences of genetic engineering and plastic surgery. One Friday evening the Kleins, the family of a wealthy Jewish physician, are very literally faced with questions that humanity has hitherto dealt with only in theory. On this evening, the Kleins must decide which course the world should take in the future and whether good is good and evil is evil. On this evening, the Kleins must choose between life and death.

In the winter of 2002, a person who ate his lover (at his lover’s request) was arrested. Even though eating a human isn’t a crime in Germany, the way to a man’s heart being through his stomach has its limitations: according to § 216 of the penal code, killing on request is punishable by between six months and five years in prison.
Igor Bauersima’s 69 is a new play full of abysmal ambiguity and provocative questioning of society’s taboos. It tells the story of the approach of an unlikely (at first glance) couple, a baroque game of deception close to the boundaries of our freedom. Designed in a palindromic form, the play has three variations (69-the good, 69-the bad and 69-the court). Between a young woman and a middle-aged man, a dreamlike and playful love story develops, constantly oscillating between intelligent seduction, sheer horror and film noir. (Announcement of the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus)

“Cape Horn is dangerous. You can lose your life trying to sail around it. Or you can always dream of trying it without living.”

A middle-aged man returns to the remote paradise of his youth – to the seaside beach where he remembers spending the best days of his life. Here he was himself, a free man. From here, he could have taken over the world. Today he hopes this place will return the primal force of innocence to him, the certainty and calm he has been missing for years. Here, he can be “who he is”. At least that’s how he explains his interest in her run-down beach house to the standoffish old lady from a good family. The lonely woman, who has nothing to expect from life anymore, lowers herself and shows sudden interest in the stranger. The unlikely couple seem destined to solve each other’s problems. But hiding behind the budding relationship is not only the idea of an improbable love, but also a deadly disaster made from deception and self-deceit. (Announcement Theater in der Josefstadt)

"Kap Hoorn is a story about the longing for fulfilment, freedom, the right to one’s own life and everything that should be included in that right.” (Igor Bauersima)

Three old friends. Author Nils, PR professional Casper and award-winning journalist Olga. One summer night, these three masters of the word get into a fight. They were inseparable during their time at university. They had agreed in writing to meet again ten years later. Soon it becomes clear that each of them had their own interpretation of their mutual promises while signing. The three of them try to get out of the looming heart-to-heart. Nils’ emotional state quickly spreads to his friends. He makes the situation inescapable. The three of them get caught in a struggle on the highest rhetorical level. They are forced to face the truth, and none is who he believes himself to be. At dawn, the conflict takes a crucial turn…

“It’s possible to achieve moral legitimation on the back of oppressed people, to stuff yourself with some remains of film glamour and fat cash, using the propaganda methods of the old slaughterers, without being held responsible by a court. And it’s possible to canonise the laws of the market even for these cases. It’s possible for us to loudly clap after being cheated for a long evening. But it’s unlikely we will gulp down the lowest common hamburger for millennia to come. Maybe the motor of history is that we’ve been really left behind by someone. At the very beginning… we proclaim ideas, even though they are lies, or we claim that our ideas are only wrong if seen next to the misled world, or we simply whack something. Or we decide to rely on the world, which is of course a reasonable, but difficult position. Or we simply do another play.” (Igor Bauersima)

A curiosity in the history of literature: in the time of Ludwig II, two French playwrights, Corneille and Racine, write simultaneously about the same subject: Bérénice. Even the first performances of both plays happen within days of each other. The subject is the same for both: How to reconcile reason and passion?
Corneille, over sixty, is unsuccessful with his play, for he is still a rationalist who believes in the ability of man to control his passions in favour of higher ethical principles of reason. Meanwhile, Racine is the voice of the 30-something generation: more sceptical (and more realistic), he describes man as a playball of his passions and struggles (in this he is a classicist) for him not to lose the fight, but also asks for the cost of sacrifice.
How could it happen that both were writing the same play at the same time? There is speculation about the countess of Orléans commissioning both plays, each author not knowing about the other. But what would have happened if the countess had also contracted the nearly fifty-year-old comedian Molière?
A story about a woman and three men, three playwrights: an intelligent enlightener, a romantic tragedian and a sceptical comedian…
A Bérénice de Molière, which however never was written. (Announcement of the Burgtheater Wien)

Inspired by real events, Aus der Sonne is a drama by Igor Bauersima, written in 2016. Three storylines describe the actions of six main characters, in parallel as well as in implied points of contact. The antithetic poles of dissidence, escapism and loss of privacy are the central aspects of the play. All three stories deal with individual decisions between compassion, integrity and death.