The two productions Das eingebildete Tier and Ein anderes Blau were created together: in their complementarity they refer to one another and yet can also be experienced independently. Because of this twin character, they can be seen on certain days as double performances. A shared intermission — with bread, soup, and a drink offered to the audience — links the two productions on those days into a special event.

An absurdly comic language spectacle, seeking to breathe fresh life into entrenched conditions, is answered with silence and stillness, and ends in collective song. Ecstasy meets quietude, wild outpouring meets meditation. Hilariously funny and heartbreakingly sad. An ensemble, a space, a musician, and two directors who encounter one another artistically, and with the ensemble search for ways to counter the violence of an accelerated present with radically different, utopian festivals of play.

Das eingebildete Tier (DEA)

An ecstatic spectacle of humanity

Humans. Animals. Chaos. Wild circus. Light and pleasure. Uprising. Transformation. Valère Novarina’s texts are true hell-mixers, making the never-ending adventure of language palpable as an autonomous force — worldly, brimming with unrestrained wit. In France, Novarina is celebrated as the great theater-maker of our time, selling out theaters across the country for weeks on end, while for German theater he still remains a discovery. More than enough reason to stage, for the very first time in Germany, a major work by this extraordinary author and theater artist!

Humankind possesses a very special instrument that makes it, above all other creatures, the master of utopia: from its mouth it ceaselessly emits language, through which it is capable of expressing the most impossible and outlandish things. With speech, it summons forth everything that does not (yet) exist. With language, this “imaginary animal” that it is, throws all its might against death: to the ceaseless threat of nothingness, it opposes EVERYTHING — and invites us to watch on stage as unheard-of sounds, tones, and words emerge from imagination.

The great French theater-maker Molière wrote and performed The Imaginary Invalid right up until his actual death on the boards that, as the saying goes, “mean the world.” In a similarly absurd and frenetic parade, a vivid troupe of nine performers now gathers at Theater an der Ruhr to reveal to us the full power of the “imaginary animal”: through dance and music, with despair and comedy, they surrender themselves to language and create a world we have never before seen or heard — a utopia.

Ein anderes Blau (UA)

Imagine that behind appearances something begins to shine. Something shifts, unfolds around you. Suddenly, you glimpse the possible paths of your life. Are you dreaming? It is as if your perception is thickening. You do not yet know, but there is a sense of where you are being drawn in the time given to you. You pause. You are not alone. There it is, the moment in which silence transforms into song.

Inspired by Novalis’ unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, by the motifs of longing in Romanticism, and by a related exploration of the fear of death, the ensemble embarks on an unconventional search for the possibilities of encounter and connectedness. How can we rediscover ourselves and the world around us? What excites us? What drives us? Which fears and separations can we overcome, which communities can we form?

Between meditation and choreography, slapstick and tenderness, the evening unfolds — largely without words — into a poetic sequence of images that shows people sometimes lonely together, sometimes as a group cancelling each other out, and finally united in unreserved harmony. It leads us into the dawning certainty that everything that is, could also be otherwise.