Escaping Helden­platz (UA)

KGI – Büro für nicht übertragbare Angelegenheiten, Köln

In his last play, Thomas Bernhard used the story of a Jewish family in Vienna to examine the extent of anti-Semitism in 1988. The premiere at the Burgtheater became the biggest theater scandal after '45 and could only take place under police protection due to calls for a boycott, physical attacks and death threats. In KGI's interpretation of "Heldenplatz," the audience embarks on a search for traces of the scandal and of the anti-Semitism
of today: what happens when we dare to look into the abyss of the past?

By means of VR glasses, the spectator:inside is transported into a nightmare of the unconscious that attempts to look behind the polished facades of the seemingly undamaged culture industry. A rapturous odyssey between VR and theater, guilt and the unconscious, past and present begins.

Funded by: Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen im Rahmen von NEUE WEGE in Zusammenarbeit mit dem NRW KULTURsekretariat.

Deutschlandfunk Kultur FAZIT, Dotothea Marcus

"The VR installation [...] is of the highest artistic quality. [...] This spinning through space and time and the fact that these continuities of anti-Semitism exist are masterfully brought together here"

"It is simply breathtaking and almost spooky how the production tells [the newly awakening anti-Semitism]"