People disappear, are locked away and their traces are covered. Tyranny is not only prevalent in authoritarian systems: all over the world, attempts are being made to eradicate the diversity of social realities and visions, even in democratic societies.
For Out of Sight - International Playwrights Laboratory, four author*s from Kurdistan, South Africa, Palestine and Mexico have written texts on the subject of disappearance, which will be shown for the first time on screen at an event in Gorki and will later be available online. An experiment. Hybrids between theatre and film.
The Kurdish text BÎRA MIRIYAN (The Well of the Dead) by YILDIZ ÇAKAR follows different mothers in search of the bones of their disappeared sons through the totalitarian state bureaucracy of modern Turkey. Bashar Murkus and his ensemble of the Palestinian Khashabi Theatre have selected one of the stories for the video reading and staged it in a furious rhythm in Haifa.
ON NOAH'S BLOODSTAINED RAINBOW, WE DANCE. by MONAGENG "VICE" MOTSHABI deals with a judicial system based on colonial heritage. A post-Mandela plot, partly filmed in Berlin by the collective Labor Noir, directed by Lara-Sophie Milagro, in which many references to German post-colonial history appear.
CAMPO (Field) written by the Mexican author Laura Uribe is staged in a desktop format video by Anestis Azas in Athens. The documentary piece asks what a field is in a country where mass graves are sought underground in the hope of finding the bodies of disappeared family members.
GRADUATION by Dalia Taha is about a girl who, in a Palestinian city under Israeli control, learns hard truths about herself and the history of her family between the end of puberty and adolescence. Laura Uribe stages a demonstrative video reading with three masked women on the streets of Mexico City.
A project of the Maxim Gorki Theatre in cooperation with the Literary Colloquium Berlin (LCB), the New Institute for Dramatic Writing (NIDS), Robert Bosch Foundation and the Schauspiel Stuttgart. Supported by the Robert Bosch Foundation.
