Meinnicht

“Gesine Danckwart is a seismograph of her generation. Her fast, floating plays… are collages from media quotes and daily small talk, which densify lyrically again and again, brittle language partitures full of sadness, comedy, insecurity and sometimes surprisingly beautiful.

This also holds true for… Summerwine, a summery longing triangle story, whose tender plot threads intertwine again and again, making present and future into a melange. … Summerwine is a sweet-dry portrait of a generation, with headache and self-distrust, full of longing for the lost ease.”
(Frankfurter Rundschau on the premiere at the Forum Freies Theater Düsseldorf on 1 March 2001)

May I ask you? May I not you, please please? Please, I, I make you, but I make you. May I not you a bit bit happy. But I make you happy. You. I saw this face, this white fear-face, which can’t be anything else. It’s dangerous. This little bit bit more risk I have to afford myself, and this when but the fall. I hold on, cling. I don’t want to slip, slip away. I have to be careful. Bone glass. Have to keep smooth by re-inventing myself. Constantly. Against an abyss. Stoop and stretch. Inside is a monster. From when is there this monster. Hold on, stick to the things. Where am I please. When.

“The characters, language and text machines, which are subject to the constant current of the motivational anglicisms as well as an atrophy of language, don’t exist within a closed plot and order. The deconstruction of a tangible order is impossible to reproduce in a dramatic plot. It is more a composition of characters, dislocation, platitudes, in between fragments of individual people with a story, their own emotions. The sudden change from the position of a producer to the position of a consumer, who is his own producer, the citizen’s duty to be his own sales market and aficionado of the structure exploiting him.
To whose rhythm am I working here? Tomorrow I get up. What.” (Gesine Danckwart)

This theatre text is about the effects of advertising on the individual person, about self-presentation, anorexia, identity problems, about the difficulties of growing up, about the small gestures of daily life, which are so hard to make yet necessary for inventing oneself new on every day that will be.

A foursome of young people, all of them successful, for whom success is apparently not enough. Something is missing. They talk in the staccato of hurt winners. They don’t have conversations. Reality – and truth – particles are haunting their words and some leftovers of vague memories. “Yesterday”, one of the women says, “you talked. We’ve had a conversation about something. We had a topic, bollocks, a variety of topics.” It’s this wild grief, that was previously called longing, that they have lost and which they no longer even really know how they could get back.

This text by Gesine Danckwart is another attempt to break open the structure of monologues and to cut them next to each other, in which she tries to “re-focus the chaos”.

“Gesine Danckwart’s text, which has been performed for the first time in Jena as a co-production of the local Theaterhaus and the TIF, the Sophiensaele Berlin and the Thalia Theater Hamburg, consists of monologues, which sometimes emerge from the internal, sometimes nearly becoming dialogues, but ceasing in the decisive moment out of fear of disappointment of their carriers. Between the chairs, the workplace-islands in the dabbling sea of time, there is lots of space for associations, also for exhausted dynamics between silence sounding pensively, hectic bustle and hysterical tantrums. Tristesse hides in turns between frustration and small victories. But it lurks in the heads – the mind is blocked, is chafed by banalities.
It hasn’t been about the daily bread in the original sense of the word for a long time. Five lonely dayshifts, day stories, are written by the struggle for self-worth and success, against the insight in the absurdity of the performed services and one’s own existence.” (Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten)

You call your play “car” – in doing so, which meanings of cars are you interested in?
The meanings cars have are huge..., at least every seventh workplace depends on them, technological developments, hopefully progress, environmental questions, and finally our concept of mobility. The car as a means of transportation fundamentally dictates our life: where we live, how we work, how we spend our free time and thus, ultimately, our way of thinking… the car is the symbol of a modern society: individually mobile.
And, additionally, this technologically highly complex thing is a very emotional object. Nearly everyone associates intense experiences and memories with it. … along the car, you can tell stories upon stories. …

Theatre and cars, at first glance, belong to very different areas. How do you bring them together?
…you can see the theatre as a space of production, where something is produced, where machines, technicians and artists work on a common product which then must be sold. And we have discovered very theatrical moments looking at the car, at the process of selling and buying. … This becomes especially clear, … in the car worlds … there, they have staged brand temples, and the customer’s new car is presented on a turning stage, while his favourite music plays – and others watch. That’s theatre.
Just recently it has become apparent again, how much joys and sorrows of the Germans… depend on this product “car”.

Are you also interested in cars as symbols of wealth and prestige?
Cars are and always have been a status symbol. Dead certain. … The car is a social module, identities depend on the brands, I am what I drive – or not… (Berliner Zeitung)

Come with us with our propaganda meteor on a short long journey home: the theatrical-movielike performance on a completely unremarkable remarkable square in Cologne: Krefelderstraße, intersection Aquino- and Balthasarstraße. A square, looking as if it was built for being played on, but at the same time too irrelevant to have a name. A gap, emptiness, opening of the slightly boring house facades, only recognisable as a square at second glance. Corner houses from the fifties – backdrop buildings typical for Cologne. Two restaurants, one kebab shop “Balthasar”. A kiosk for everything you could need for short-term survival and the church St. Gertrud for more long-term plans. From above, look it up in Google Maps, the church looks like a flash. For this backdrop, a 3D-play is being developed. Discovering the world in daily details.
The audience walks over and through the square’s stories, the places of use, the church. Can you hear? In the behind overground? The overtone choir has been rehearsing here for half an eternity. We will play on this square. With actors. Residents. With them. Audience in motion. With our protagonists. Who lives here? How? Do you believe? If you had to leave on the next Mars expedition tomorrow, what would you take to space – and what would you leave behind?
The focus is the meteor. A theatre miracle machine. Propaganda robur and multiplex theatre in one. The research mobile and mirror cabinet we’re transmitting the square radio from. Craned up for the final showdown. (Schauspiel Köln)

They are all at home in wonderland: the poor, the careerists, the young, the mothers, the unemployed – Danckwart’s city characters. Weightlessly, they emerge again and again from this literary mosaic of urban coexistence, counter existence and cooperation. The fine image of a cruel, but also promising big city reality.

Die Rheinpfalz attributed the reason for it all being so wonderfully weightless and comical, full of elated melancholia, to Gesine Danckwart not only being a mercilessly loving people-watcher, but also a refiner of language, written in a review of the first staging by Cilli Drexel, which was invited to the Autorentage at the Deutsche Theater Berlin.
Wonderland was created as a commissioned work for the Frankfurter Positionen 2013, which had the slogan “At the border – about the future of the modern age” and illuminated the “manifestations of specifically modern shifts in the borders of our western civilisation in a dynamic accelerated by climate change”.

Single mother with little daughter. Blonde. At the moment: golden blonde. In Berlin. At the Kotti. Above the clouds – and the junkies. Pulsating dirt with a dream view. Is that okay for a mother? The blonde woman thinks: yes. The little duck simply gets carried. And loaded like that, she hunts, savanna blonde, through a freelancing, autonomous artist’s life. Networking, kissing the child, side jobs, kindergarten kitchen, togetherness, loneliness, failing, success, exhaustion and getting up again. Still, she doesn’t fold. The blonde becomes a symbolic woman of our ambivalent times, in which the desire for a maximum of compatibility demands giving up the very last ounces of strength. But if that has to happen, then at least it happens when you’re platinum blonde!

A young woman is pondering while sitting in the bathtub. Mostly about herself. Debating the difficulties of urinating in train toilets and asking when she should wash her hair again. It’s a babbling, a feeling and a digging in the foam of words, under which there is nothing solid, nothing tangible. But the speech is not all hot air either, for the play with fragmented images of female identity is much too intimate, much too tender. Relaxed and cheeky, she takes stock: of the female body, men and sex. In the end, the bathtub-sitter is left with only one question: “Am I a yummy offer?”

“Heißes Wasser für alle is an installation of text, music, actors and this speaking, this speaking for survival against the abyss, only to whom, to whom actually, and asking yourself and who could reply, when we actually in the Western wonder world, and somewhere else there isn’t even water, and it’s mundane, but this sweater was really too cheap, and again she had said the wrong thing, and he crawled up the walls on this endless Sunday, in this office, where he had gone to pass the time and then finally this hymn resounded in the two room flats and everyone formed into the choir of We.
Heißes Wasser für alle is this enamel sign, which demands life quality long passed for us, is after the orgy and always before the orgy. Heißes Wasser für alle desperately asks about the easy survival, here and always here, failing before the elsewhere.”
(Gesine Danckwart)

“I base my work on an unstable international situation, on a world which is either very easy or very flat. The course of a story isn’t interesting to me, neither the naturalistic dialogic speaking in turns, this can be found in other layers, between internal and external perspective for example.”
(Gesine Danckwart in Der Standard)

“Shake it. Monday stays Monday, there is only one night in Neuruppin. Wrong. The May and harbour feast means partying Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Netto is after all a cheap discounter. And this here is a try. We’ve got in much trouble as well, why is it like that and the young ones want to work here too, and others especially like about Netto that the old people work here. As a chance. Of course, they are not young anymore. The concentration slips, you need longer for the tasks and you’re exhausted faster. Processes don’t work that fast anymore. Then, the queue is standing there and complaining, but some come exactly because of that. That the old people work here is something they like. I’d prefer mixed, but it’s quite normal, actually. We had so much press.”
“And now we sit here, in these abandoned villages in this no-man’s land that has always been a no-man’s land, and the only hope is Stettin Szezin and the Poles with their Polish women come over and they are not coming for the asparagus harvest, they buy houses and their Polish women look much better than the thing getting fat in the other armchair.
Or ambitious people from Berlin. No god helps us to preserve our world.”
“Why are we exactly here?”
The first performance was part of the festival “Poker in the East” at the Hebbel am Ufer, at which the results of research were presented: The East: “Where is that?”.

With THEBLONDPROJECT we want to initiate bleaching processes. Blonde as a strategy of value transformation taken to the extreme. To what extent are our careers shaped by our role images? How can we vary patterns of thought and action, perform freedom from gender and power issues?
On the basis of a two-year survey of work and power structures along our own paths, on the crossroad with our partner theatres Burgtheater and Deutsche Oper, we will develop two productions that relate thematically to each other, but work with different aesthetics.
From an extensive interview research, texts, videos, music and a manifesto will emerge. We work in a fraying of the arts, in an interplay of biographical anecdotes and the question of the underlying structure. By playing with our human avatars, we bring our blonde insights and demands in Vienna and Berlin from the houses to the streets and into the net. Blond is for everyone. (Gesine Danckwart / Chez Company)

The Peace of Westphalia is an impressive example of a long and warlike conflict not ending in violence, but with dialogue at the negotiating table. 2023 marks the 375th anniversary of this peace treaty. The artists' collective Chez Company is staging a public reflection on peace and peace negotiations. Together with actors, flâneurs and city actors, the collective will read and perform a text written by the authors as an act of civil negotiation and encounter in public space. (Announcement of the Theater Münster)