On October 3, 1938, just before Pogrom Night, the city of Dortmund ordered the city’s Great Synagogue to be torn down. On October 3rd, 2020, just a few meters from the square of the Old Synagogue, the city theater opened its season with this text. After Munich and Berlin, the writer Sivan Ben Yishai is performing her text in a special collaboration with the duo HYENAZ: “Our city from bird’s eyes / bleeding in the dark”. The performative, musical reading is a meditation on the 35 days of repentance, which lie between October 3 and November 9, and draws an arc from the past to the future.
The 2020 edition of the Droste Festival features a dialogic project between authors Sivan Ben Yishai and Maren Kames. These two incisive voices of a younger literary generation interrogate war, peace, and their transhistorical entanglement with language, engaging Droste’s legacy as both interlocutor and spectral collaborator. The project is produced by and features HYENAZ, who weave sonic architecture and filmic praxis into the discourse as well as performing in the work.
Eight young female bodies are lying in a tent, breathing in unison and protecting the rifles under their mattresses, waiting for the next mission. Their nightmares during the night and the daydreams of army’s everyday life are experienced together. Again and again the soldiers circle the multiple possibility of their own death. What dies in a person when they operate the trigger of a loaded gun? When does the dispossession of your own body begin? In the fourth part of her tetralogy, Let The Blood Come Out To Show Them, writer Sivan Ben Yishai holds a ceremony of memory. Which visible and invisible traces does serving the so-called fatherland leave in a person?
Selected for Radikal Jung – Festival für junge Regie 2020.
Credits
Written by
Sivan Ben Yishai
Directed by
Sasha Marianna Salzmann
Sound Design
HYENAZ
Stage & Costumes
Cleo Niemeyer
Dramaturgy
Rebecca Ajnwojner
Dramaturgic Advisor
Anna Heesen
Lighting Design
Fritz Stötzner
Sound Engineer
Miloš Janjić
Translation
Maren Kames
Cast
Kenda Hmeidan, Abak Safaei-Rad, Elena Schmidt, Catherine Stoyan