Welcome to Paradise Lost

You can feel shame but also pride when you finally dare to show the whole world your true self. Coming out as a queer person is often a process full of contradictions. Fears and hopes accompany all those who express their feelings and wishes freely for the first time. A new world can open up when one faces the challenge of rediscovering one's identity, finding love, forming relationships and starting families outside the traditional paths. Falk Richter lets seven queer performers from five different countries tell very personal stories about their experiences and asks: What have we achieved? What lies behind us? What will the future bring? And can the dreams of a world where everyone can feel free and safe come true?

PRIDE celebrates the achievements of the long struggle for equality and freedom. And in doing so, takes a close look at the worrying rise of old and new homophobia in countries like Poland and Hungary, where the freedom of queer people is once again at stake.

The mating of the human species in the urban centers of the western hemisphere has become quite complicated. The deregulation of neoliberal modernism finally unleashed a marriage market in the early 21st century, and today the selection of potential partners for both casual and serious relationships has become complex and infinitely promising. The intoxication of love, our ultimate utopia, has been transformed into a hotly contested market. And when love is found, the real work begins: both in the relationship and within the individuals involved.

Where can we find the intoxicating emotions, the all-consuming passion, which can give sense and depth to the life, this transcendent experience that surpasses our everyday existence? Can the secret longing for the limitation and loss of control of the self only fulfill itself systematically in the noise of consumption, work, or the stock exchange? Has our hard-won autonomy and self-responsibility as modern individuals become a curse? (Düsseldorf Theater)

A woman and her husband. At last they have succeeded: they live in a safe settlement. But the threat of the unsafe outside world and the fear of societal collapse have seeped through into the marriage and the family. And if they lose their jobs, their place within the "Gated Community" is threatened. A life lived in fear. Even their own son could be a possible enemy, an agent who could betray their safe home in the settlement. A nigh-time conversation with the threateningly weak-willed father turns into an interrogation, and then into a duel.

Here, Richter condenses the uncertainty of a family threatened with downfall into a dystopian crime novel. In a claustrophobic chamber play, emotions, observations and suspicions become inextricable. Facts and dreams oscillate and create a new reality, a reality of fear. A nightmare from which there is no awakening. Thus, the protective fence of the settlement becomes the wall of an inner prison, one from which there is no escape in Western society. (Announcement of the Schaubühne at Lehniner Platz, Berlin)

This fairy tale of electronic times takes place in the electronic Metropolis, a global city, completely controlled by the ubiquitous service industries. This world calls for the flexible human being, slowly dissolving between digital communication and global standardization. All that remains is someone who can only identify themself as a 0 or 1 in ever changing chains of numbers. The only escape from this endless flow of data and capital is a power failure, an error in the system, and the hysterical idle motion that kicks in when everything fails.

With this play, we inevitably think of all the news reports about the wars of this world.
Two people, a young man and an elderly man, are standing facing each other.
The younger one asks questions, questions about the past.
Yes, the neighbors were nice.
Yes all of them, especially the Syrians, replies the elder.
Yes, and today, today there are significantly fewer dead, and someone blows up only now and then.
The bodies are regularly removed.
Also, we finally have enough oil and water.
But after awhile he hesitates with his answers. He becomes increasingly uncertain, and the questions become more urgent, more personal.
The mood is changing. The older one becomes an interrogator, has to justify himself and gets increasingly distressed.
Falk Richter's play Deutlich weniger Tote abducts the audience into a totalitarian state, which comes very close to surveillance state.

TRUST, or trust--that is what this is about: a basic feeling of emotional security or maybe the loss of this feeling, the loss of trust. TRUST also means, in an economic sense, the merger of several companies with the goal of legal and economic independence, for the purpose of forming a monopoly and maximizing profits. So Falk Richter uses both meanings of the word, in his lounge-theater developed in collaboration with the Dutch choreographer Anouk van Dijk. In so doing, he breaks down the market mechanisms of global capitalism and the financial crisis to the level of private relationships—and this has the potential both for humor and for anger. And although Richter lets out some steam and criticizes capitalism, which feels enormously freeing, the evening is still accompanied by a sense of profound sadness, a feeling of hopeless loneliness and isolation in a world out of order, a world in which every sense of security has been lost.

Paul, a consultant in his mid-forties, is called for the tenth time, and then the gate closes, boarding completed. Paul hears his name again and again, he enjoys it. For a moment, he is not being efficient. He stands still. He freezes. He falls through the memories of his childhood, his victories and his defeats, his women, about whom he has only vague memories. His unfulfilled longings return with all their might. He could be a different person. But the next generation is already waiting for a moment of weakness, the end of his career.

"Then suddenly she turned away and slept, I stared at her, stared at the canal, cold, and it began to snow, suddenly a window opened, I heard screams, a man and a woman in a violent quarrel. Suddenly a cat flies out of the window, the man seizes the cat by the tail and hurls it through the high arch on the canal, the cat stretches out all four legs, fear in her face, tries to stop herself, but finds nothing to stop herself, no. It's so cold outside, it's snowing, it's freezing, everything slows down, the cat looks at me as if she's looking for help, I look back, I can not help you, I'm the same, and she's flying. Panic in the direction of the slowly approaching surface of the canal, strikes and freezes a few centimeters below the surface with the expression of horror, the most panicky fear and despair and remains lying, twitching a few more minutes or hours, I’m not sure, and she dies, I watch the cat, and she freezes, freezes in her death." (Announcement of the Schaubühne at Lehniner Platz, Berlin)

Men and women in a society in transition—how can our old gender images be redefined? Do new love arrangements dissolve old ones or simply replace them? How do we live, and with whom? And who really keeps us from being who we are? Nowadays, in the big city and in the country. The family? Politics? The prevailing social conditions?

A man alone late at night, thrown back on himself and his frenzied thoughts, this has been a common motif in literature not only since Goethe's Faust. Seen from a distance, the Corona Crisis can also be seen as a gigantic experiment on the living modern subject: Man is thrown out of a frenetic life into the idle state of the lockdown and suddenly has to find his way around again. The diary is deleted. The hamster wheel stands still. The stress gives way to emptiness, and suddenly big questions arise. How do I want to live? In isolation, the person sees himself at the mercy of his own vulnerability, confronted with his own finiteness. What has my life been like up to now, how should it be in the future? With the questions, great feelings also break through: Loneliness and love, fear and anger. The experiment is unique. It takes place for everyone individually and at the same time for everyone. It confronts us with the truth about ourselves and about the society we will return to after this night. (Art Festival Weimar)

“He” is a DJ who has worked in clubs, has transformed moods into sounds: a god of the techno sphere. “She” used to have a daily programme in a music channel before their communal project started: life as a work of art, everyday life in their own appartment – trash and museum installation at the same time – as a performance in front of the video camera which transmits the images via internet to an exhibition hall. Only when they make love, do they turn off the camera.
“An atmospheric picture from the spheres of the youth cult between techno and cyber, between email and Derrida.” (Der Tagesspiegel)
“Falk Richter’s Pop-Pirandello is a computer clean construction the truth content of which nobody can determine because all transitions between art and life have been thoroughly blurred. The dialogue flows like a long sound track, the language hums in long, softly swinging sentences, dialogues are alternating speakers in endless succession. The dramaturgy follows the cut’n’mix technique of set pieces, new topics are faded in and out and revolved around themselves whilst the characters change from one sound to the next. God is a DJ is a drama which the times deserve: a play about a cultural industry which has become the contemporary art scene.” (Theater heute)

Germany, in the autumn of 2015. In a country that is seen by many as free, open, and diverse, fear runs rampant. Fear of strangers, fear of extinction, of being overwhelmed; fear of being lied to by politicians and the media. Fear of being terrorized by minorities who demand equal rights, fear of losing one’s own privileges. Falk Richter focuses on the monsters that give birth to these fears, and he takes us on a journey through abandoned and thriving, real and virtual German landscapes, where we meet a Christian fundamentalist hate preacher, anxious citizens, and anxious parents, and join the conspiratorial alliance between the political right, the church and the aristocracy for the re-Christianization of the West.

"If this piece were called EXHAUSTION, then we would see a very lonely man ..."

The search for a title that says everything that unites everything in itself. "A title can determine the direction." A title can include everything, exclude many things. A title must be an answer. In the search for such a title, the AUTHOR in Protect me moves between taking stock and looking back, between what is and what probably will not come to be. Lost, nearing Lenz's madness, he looks for answers in the circle of his intimate confidants, who are no longer near to him: his dying father, the friend who is only interested in herself and her boyfriend, and a therapist.
In Protect me Falk Richter, talks about the constant pressure of an author and director to create experience, about neglected love, and finally, about one who seems to lose himself.

"An author looks for a title for his new piece and can find it neither in the tangled information of a globalized world drifting into the madness nor in the undergrowth of his depressed emotional life." (Eberhard Spreng, dradio)

Radio announcer’s voice: ... is the coldest day since the year 1827 ... minus 34 degrees Celsius since last Friday ... the temperature is expected to fall further over the holidays.
Child: Mom turned off her mobile phone - I cannot reach anyone here.
Radio announcer’s voice: ... the meteorologists expect a storm at about 2 o'clock in the morning with a sensible temperature of minus 42 degrees Celsius.

One day during the winter, December 24th, the night of lonely people. Richter's new play, a kaleidoscope-like montage of mini-psychodramas and nightmare images, follows women and men through this nightly urban jungle in their biggest moment of crisis to date: They are approaching their forties, their first marriages and careers have failed, and Christmas intensifies this battlefield of relationships to an emotional state of emergency. They argue and reconcile, love, hit and hate each other, rely on each other.
Their children wander through the corridors of international airports, journeying between the fragments of their patchwork families.

A twelve-year-old boy has been forgotten by his father in the airport kindergarten, and the nursery teacher can only tell stories of terrible accidents and catastrophes. But the boy meets an old woman who is looking for her son. He has not gotten in touch for years because he has to work day and night. And the two of them are trying to remember how a certain story went—a famous story that will make this evening into a uniquely hysterical-depressive party ... (Announcement of the Schaubühne at Lehniner Platz, Berlin)

The setting of the play is the time of the massacre in Kosovo, so the 21st century, when wars of this kind are the order of the day, and the lack of orientation amongst young people in their thirties has reached its peak, and not only in Europe. The battles of the old-68-ers are undigested history, the Holocaust of the Second World War haunts their minds as a quasi-forgotten phantom, the pressure to adapt to a society that has lost any political or economic alternative turns into a ruthless and identity-less actionism.

Which battlefields we are headed towards, which catastrophic areas we enter to get a unique "Take", the never-seen horror-photo—these are no longer distinguishable. It is only important to hold on to the connection to the moment and to protect oneself by distraction from reflection, from turning inwards. You do not sleep anymore, you collapse for brief moments, and physical touch only serves as an escape valve to prevent the final overkill.

A rapid disaster scenario of great explosiveness and timeliness.

"Richter thus tells the story of the war in the minds and hearts of the West, not how it really was, but how it came to be. It is the story of a self-referential media-cave and its inhabitants, and the strength of Falk Richter's text comes to light, for instance, in the monologues, an intermediate state which reproduces the foggy perplexity of this time." (Süddeutsche Zeitung)

As if after first contact with a new era, which would have appeared only months ago as a dystopian vision of the future, many familiar mechanisms from the epoch, which until recently we considered to be the present, are put to the test. Falk Richter and Anouk van Dijk, with their ensemble between dance and drama, think very individually about how caesuras in our way of living together, of organising ourselves politically, of doing business, touch the biographies and bodies of the performers. Physical contact and closeness change from a sign of affection to a potential threat. How do we position ourselves in the field of tension between security, freedom and health? Is the end of the Anthropocene dawning, the much conjured up age in which the species of mankind saw itself as the centre and crown of creation? Do all these upheavals also offer opportunities and lessons? (Announcement Munich Kammerspiele)

"The day I tried to numb myself and wanted to listen to my blood-stream, hmmm, fell to the floor, heard the sound and ahhh did not feel any pain, everything just happened and I was the coolest insect around, nobody could harm me, and if I harmed myself, I did it just to experiment on the facts of life."

After the body has been brought to collapse due to deliberate overload, the human being collapses into itself, happily empty and exhausted, and no longer moves. His thoughts begin to flow. We are our own Crash Test Dummies and experiment with our own resilience, expose ourselves to extreme situations, do not allow ourselves to rest. We want to bring ourselves to peak performance and slowly push ourselves into a painless space. (Falk Richter)

Everything. In one Night tells the story of a young woman who declares the night and the big city as her territory. She leaves behind the everyday structures which have become too peaceful for her in order to experience “everything” which life hasn’t offered her in experiences and changing emotions “in one night” with her body and mind. Very consciously she moves into situations which until now were strange to her. And in doing so, she watches herself and her counterparts in the process very precisely: She doesn’t want to rush through the chaos of the night, but wants to experience, to keep protocol, to trace, to discover, to understand. At dusk she sets herself aim and time limit. By dawn she wants to have experienced everything in order to be able to decide afterwards as what person she wants to return or to set off.
The play is put together from protocols of intimate conversations between the author and director Falk Richter with the actress Marie Bäumer and other women of her generation which he has assembled with other characters and texts into a new fictional character. The character “Marie” changes with ease from pure textual speech to musical language of pop songs, the songs and chansons which form the mythical substance of a young generation because they supply a language for every emotion and every mood, whether authentic or borrowed. (Falk Richter)

Europe is in a state of emergency, Germany is sinking into fear. The terror comes nearer; there is a string of sexual assaults by immigrants on New Year’s Eve; right-wing parties are again very popular. Falk Richter reminds us of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who, in 1977 in the context of the RAF terror, responded with the film Deutschland im Herbst. Parallels become visible: the desire for an authoritarian ruler who will solve the unmanageable political situation in Europe without turning Europe into ruins.

* "Fassbinder", "Rainer Werner Fassbinder" and "RWF" (as word and picture watermark) are registered trademarks of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation"

A play like a soundtrack about love and its failure. The tracklist is variable, but the band always plays the right song. Even if it still isn’t loud enough to drown out the noise. No matter how long we talk about it, the perfect day does not exist, as long as intimacy remains something abstract.
Falk Richter and his German-Belgian ensemble looked into their own biographies and found the most diverse stories. Serious and yet full of humor, they tell of men and women, children and their parents, couples and families. A playful examination of the emotional world at the beginning of the 21st century.

Is the contemporary crisis a crisis of masculinity? The time is ripe for new ideas. But even though everything is shifting, a conservative social rollback is emerging. Men appear to be stuck in old patterns, prisoners in the system of male dominance. What does it mean to be a man in the year 2020? Falk Richter’s In My Room is a research project that unfolds a multilayered web of memories, images and voices from the personal space of a son and author, weaving biographical experiences with social narratives into a panorama of a present become past. It’s made up of snapshots of sons remembering their fathers, family rituals, everyday stories and societal developments. In My Room is a personal autofiction experiment that dives into the unexplored black boxes that fathers leave behind. At the same time, it’s also, an imaginary echo chamber in search of traces of one’s father in one’s own life.

Since the war in Iraq, the horrifying vision of a permanent war has haunted the edges of Western prosperity zones. Sometimes this war, with its suicide attacks, reaches the cities of the West. But who is the enemy, how does it tick, and what must we do to defend ourselves? Embedded in a permanent briefing, the last journalists fight with the last press agents for truth and neutrality. But they too have become combatants. Everyone can be an enemy. Everyone is at the front. (Announcement of the Schaubühne at Lehniner Platz, Berlin)

Three friends meet during a cold night for an out-of-control reunion, a birthday party in their shared apartment, ten years after the end of their youthful freedom. What has remained of their old plans and utopias? And their great declaration of love? One wants to marry, another has decided not to work anymore and not to participate in this whole "welfare shit". It is better to spin records in remote clubs where everyone who does not want to participate can still resist the sellout of ideals. But why? We are getting older and the weather is becoming colder: quick, collect wood for the next few years, or we will freeze to death.
The night seems to be endless and the thermometer drops, the heater is broken, and the door is no longer open. And time stops for a moment, a complete stand still, and there is only the music, one song playing again and again. It’s "New Grass" by Mark Hollis, who shut himself in a clinic years after his career as a pop star, in order to get rid of all commercialization and to work on his new perfect sound. The three are celebrating a strangely life-hungry swan song to efficiency, commerce, marriage, child bearing, Condoleeza Rice, Justin Timberlake, and everything else that makes life no longer worth living.

Sieben Sekunden is a lightning-fast oratorio about a war. Nobody knows either when it started nor when it will end.
The laws according to which the war is fought seem to be those of an American soap opera.
A bomber pilot is on his way to his destination. In front of him there is his on-board computer, under him the desert, in his head he pictures his family: Marge while shopping, the children playing, Marge in front of the TV.
Provincial everyday life in America and warmongering permeate each other. The onboard computer fails. The shooter becomes the projectile. The crash lasts seven seconds - we see the last images, the thoughts of the pilot, and a film that says nothing about the reality of the war.

Falk Richter's meticulously composed linguistic hysteria gives way to a breathless silence, the nothingness that arises when images collapse. (Stephan Wetzel)

A man of forty, a writer, at night in a hotel room: While his father is struggling with the ever nearing death in the hospital, the author reflects on his own life. He wants to write a piece, an autobiography, full of the memories of his own origin, the well-heeled bourgeois tristesse of his youth, the narrowness of his family home. The moment of farewell from his parents becomes a personal test, one which marks the end point of his own youth.