Schwarzer Block

Schwarzer Block by Kevin Rittberger is a play about anti-fascism as a Sisyphean project, about a 100 year history of left-wing militancy as an attempt to stop the Nazis’ reign of terror, about the contradiction between emancipation and group. At first glance, the black bloc doesn’t seem to be the most apt material for theatrical protagonists: it’s an alert system with a precarious position; it doesn’t want to be recognized, but heard instead; it doesn’t give interviews; and lively dialogue isn’t its primary form of communication. But because the bloc isn’t a bloc, but rather a self-questioning formation of resistance, in this play it pushes through to the stage, a movement in space that sets off conflicts.

Over a year and a half, Kevin Rittberger researched the history of the anti-fascist struggle in Germany, sifting through archives, conducting interviews, meeting activists and working through tortuous neo-Nazi »literature«. A polyphonic dramatic poem has emerged from this material, in which the ghosts of anti-fascist history throw their grappling hooks into the present, and the other way around. Together with around 14 actors, Sebastian Nübling searches for a »we« at a distance in the Container and on the Gorki mainstage. Together they rise to the challenge of transferring political action into the abstract theatre space.

World Premiere on 5/September 2020


 Directory of the dead Antifascists 
 

 
Photo: Esra Rotthoff
Stage Photos: Ute Langkafel, Lutz Knospe