PRIDE 2025
„I wish we could just be there touching kissing listening to some soft music with only the sky and stars above us, forgetting about our history, our wars and everything that might tear us apart.“
The German version of Falk Richter's PRIDE.
The world premiere took place at the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen in 2021.
A Perfect Sky
Not only is there talk of "artificial intelligence" everywhere, AI is already intervening in everyday life in almost all areas of life, taking over administration, organising our love life, determining the soundtrack of the train journey, reducing errors in the operating theatre and planning holidays. She writes poems and letters of application, art criticism and theatre plays. Behind it all is the dream of perfection, the longing to fill in the gaps, to make the world a better place, to free it from what, as "human error", is the cause of misunderstandings, annoyance, effort and pain. Alongside this triumph of speed, accuracy and precision, the human body seems strangely fragile and weak, imperfect in its transience, its ageing, its fatigue. But isn't this precisely what makes people uncopyable: the hesitation, the unpredictability of feeling and the power to think change?
In their new collaboration, Falk Richter and choreographer Anouk van Dijk explore this contrast. The triumph of the machines comes at a time when it seems to be becoming increasingly difficult to be together, to overcome loneliness. Richter and van Dijk's new piece tells of fragility and fragmentation, of robot romance and analogue longing, of love in the age of its technical reproducibility.
UNDER ICE
Paul, a consultant in his mid-40s, is called for the tenth time. The gate is closing: final boarding call. Paul hears his name again and again and enjoys it. For this one moment he is not efficient. He stands still. He freezes. He falls unexpectedly into a powerful angst that does not want to end, tumbling through memories of his childhood, his accomplishments, his failures, and his women, whom he remembers only vaguely. His unfulfilled longings return in full force. He could still become another person. But the next generation is crouching in the jungle for the one moment of weakness, for the end of his career.
TRUST
In their project TRUST, Falk Richter, author and director, and Anouk van Dijk, dancer and choreographer, and an ensemble made up of actors from the Schaubühne and dancers from the anoukvandijk dc company, explore the shaky foundations and mechanisms of human bonds against the background of current crises. Relationships build up and break down in ever shorter time-scales; they become a resource in an increasingly intense competition. Binding, seperating. Buying, selling. A picture is presented of human beings who, over the years, have radically intensified modern individuality and celebrated independence as an ideal.
LEAR
Director Karin Lind is talking to her father on the phone. "Are you crying, Dad? No storm knocks us down. We can cope with anything." The celebrated director Erik Lind is to stage King Lear by William Shakespeare. But, after suffering a heart attack, he has been hospitalised. His daughter takes over his legacy in order to save his last great production. Through stormy nights of rehearsals, she immerses herself into the story of the old King Lear and furthermore her own troubled relationship with her father. Shakespeare tells the story of the once mighty Lear now being old and weak. In order to reassure himself of his daughters' love, they are asked to declare their affection for him before divvying up the inheritance. The price is the largest part of his kingdom. The youngest daughter refuses such competition: she loves her father Lear the way a child should love her parents, no more, no less. However, this is not what her father wants to hear. Disappointed and angry, Lear rejects his youngest daughter. While working on the material of King Lear, Karin starts to doubt: how indebted is she to her father, who was tyrannical in the past and now lies terminally ill?
Falk Richter's adaptation of Lear, based on William Shakespeare's 1606 tragedy King Lear, emphasises the archaic images and poetic power of the classic and transposes them into the present day. How much suffering has been caused due to the hubris of our fathers? How do we learn to be mindful and renounce our own privileges? Falk Richter uses Shakespeare's Lear to focus on people who, in their downfall, must ask themselves anew about the possibility of self-knowledge, responsibility and forgiveness. It is said that we are the product of our environment, our families and parents. Yet to what extent does the intergenerational contract represent an inescapable foundation of our existence?
Small Town Boy
"You leave in the morning with everything you own… Run away, turn away, run away, turn away, run away."
That’s how Bronski Beat described a young man’s escape from a narrow-minded world of repression and lack of recognition to the big city, far away and free: London, New York, Berlin… These metropolises were and are the place where people can rediscover and reinvent themselves, reject and question traditional roles and paths, and redefine families and relationships. They can re-negotiate their attachments, experiment with everything that their families prevented them from living out at home. Is it possible to be a different kind of man? A different kind of woman? Can you ever stop being a son or daughter? Is it possible to reject authority, and live and love in a different way? Love, in theory and in practice, appears to still be the discursive battlefield on which our many contemporary conflicts about gender, sexual and cultural identities in everyday life are carried out. What can and should a "man", a "woman" be today? How will we define family, nation and belonging in the future?
In his new play, Falk Richter explores the question of what happens when young men also leave the patriarchy behind.
Hannah Zabrisky tritt nicht auf
Hannah Zabrisky doesn’t want to go on stage. She no longer wants to perform the play she’s been rehearsing for weeks. She doesn’t want to be confronted with her own loneliness, her physical decay, her fear of growing older: she is a woman without any family, without any close friends. She can look back on a great career, but she doesn’t know whether the coming years have anything in store for her that might make it worth getting up in the morning. Outside of the theatre, a clusterfuck of entangled problems is running riot: wars and political conflicts that seem to be escalating ever faster, democracies ground down, disruption. Hannah wants a new script, a different kind of confrontation between herself and the world.
There used to be an intensity to her life, a belief that her own art could change things. There used to be a rebellious teen- ager inside of her, who fell silent over the course of the years, and is now speaking up again. What do you want with yourself, your art, your life? Which side of history do you want to be on? Somewhere between a dream, reality and the film scripts of her favourite directors, Hannah races through her internal forms of resistance – improvising against the scripts of the present. She pushes the other actors and actresses in her ensemble, the director and the author to their limits and beyond. When she refuses to simply carry on, this triggers a chain of confusion, unplanned derailments, conflicts, crises, but also unexpected alliances and new connections among the other members of the ensemble. The levels of actors and roles, reality and fiction soon shift. The conflicts and questions of the play being rehearsed become intertwined with the real challenges and problems facing the director, the author and the actors – until the boundaries between art and life become completely blurred.
FEAR
What does a family look like today? What can terms like ›origin‹, ›native country‹ and ›home‹ mean in a globalised world? With which new meanings can they be filled? Western societies live in an equal state of fear and activism. Fear is taking root across Europe, reactionary parties are growing in strength, right-wing populism, chauvinism and xenophobia are flourishing. Proponents of simplistic world views are on the up. Hard-fought-for achievements are suddenly being brought into question: the EU is being demonised, the fourth estate defamed as the »gutter press«, sexual and cultural differences are being attacked and what it means to be a man, a woman or a family is being defined in the most one- dimensional terms. In the struggle for gender equality, the institution of marriage in particular is becoming symbolically charged and romanticised by those who defend it as a privilege which is to be denied to certain social groups. A conservative ideal image of a way of life is being conjured up in order to discriminate and socially marginalise. At the same time traditional, normative definitions of belonging, nationality, religion, language, culture, gender and sexual identity seem to be being increasingly abandoned and individually redefined.
Electronic City
Tom and Joy. A love story for the beginning of the 21st century. Tom hurries confused through the corridors of a high rise, an airport, a company headquarters, he has lost his way, he has forgotten the access code, the floor and the apartment number, he doesn’t know where he is any more, Berlin, Frankfurt, New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Los Angeles – a reliable and flexible employee, his only point of reference the porn channel in his hotel room.
Joy, paralysed with panic at her little cash desk in the airport at half past one in the morning, twenty businessmen want to pay for their sandwiches and the scanner won’t work, the till is broken, the system is collapsing. But Joy has to go on, her timetable for the week, today: Frankfurt, until 4 a.m., then Tuesday: Hong Kong, overnight from 11 till 7, then on to Singapore, then the night from Saturday to Sunday in Amsterdam from 9 till 4.30 ... Joy works stand-by at the scanner desk for Prêt-à-manger International, she’s abandoned her degree... a flexible and adaptable co-worker, her dream: George Clooney.
At the gate Tom and Joy collide and break down. They come to blows over the last seat on board, get arrested and are held together, it’s the beginning of a great love story...
Electronic City has been translated into over 40 languages and has been performed all around the world since its premiere in 2003.
BAD KINGDOM
Falk Richter’s latest play for the ensemble of the Schaubühne ventures to take stock of the present in a series of fragmented scenes, variations and possible realities. Even the setting is uncertain: is all this an unsettling nightmare? Are we on a film set, and if so, what strange script is being filmed? Are we watching characters involved in a therapeutic role play? A game? Or is this actually reality after all? Something is rotten in this »bad kingdom« of the present.
Its inhabitants are anxious people in a big city. They are asking themselves how to cope with the sense of gradually losing the ground beneath their feet in the midst of overlapping crises that occur with increasing rapidity. Are there things worth fight ing for? Where are the alternative realities, existing utopias or simply places where it is possible to retreat from the constant feeling of being unable to cope? They seek ways out of their loneliness or shy away from too much intimacy. They ask themselves how they can escape the ghosts of the past in the relationships they have or would like to have in the present, escape their family structures and the marriages of their parents that have left their mark on their thoughts and feelings. They buckle under all the emotional and material baggage left to them by the previous generation.