THE FIFTH DAY
The fifth day (June 27) is also the evocation of the border experience. In the festival event we juxtapose different perspectives of seeing the issue of death and dying, and various ways of celebrating the departure: the EASTERN (Eastern Poland and Georgia): community-oriented, based on the power of tradition and means developed by generations, and the WESTERN: undertaking an individual experiment of assisting the process of dying. We will ask questions about our own identity: where are we, which ritual do we feel affinity with, where is the boundary between artistic experiment and transgression, is it possible to create personal rites.
IBSEN: GHOSTS
erformance for adult audience
In play “Ghosts” written by Ibsen, Oswald asks his mother to help him die. Not only her but many societies all over the world doubt as to whether we – the humans – have the right to self-determine about our own death. Markus & Markus met 81-year-old Margot on April 1, 2014 and remained with her during her last days, when she was finishing all the issues important her and bidding farewell to her relatives before she went on her last trip to Switzerland ... Margot was buried on May 22, 2014. Markus & Markus do not provide a solution to the dilemma – they deepen it even further, asking: what should be shown in theatre, how true, how intimate, how serious can it be? Are we voyeurs or witnesses? What should we not talk about? Should we keep silence? In the end, “everything is a theatre” and “nothing is theatre”. At the same time, their performance is a specific monument, a commemoration, a testimony of life of someone who neither they nor the audience knew before, yet who becomes very close to them. There is much more about living than about dying ...
Since 2011 we have made a name for ourselves for our unique and radical form of political theatre. Our performances have brought about public discussions that completely blur the boundaries between performance and reality. Whilst our first trilogy “POLIS3000“ was an agit-prop attack on institutionalised infantility, in the sense of “don't follow us, we don't know any better ourselves“, our current “IBSEN TRILOGY“ has a more personal feel.
The works are characterized by intensive research, whose results are then edited together into films. These video projections form the cornerstone of their live performances. However, the collective is not interested in reproducing reality, instead they focus on the ways in which the stage and reality interact.
It is confrontational, it gets out of hand, and it is – real. It is almost impossible to judge using traditional theatre concepts. The boundary of “this is where the fun stops“ has been destroyed and the freedom that results from that is both frightening and enlightening. One thing is certain: whoever was there, will not forget it.“ (Hildesheimer Allgemeine Zeitung)
What they do differently from many others is that they actually end up taking the fiction very seriously on stage. They are not that interested in the so-called realistic or in the reproduction of reality. Instead they kind of heighten reality using a fictional screen like Ibsen's and then they really turn it up a notch. They appear to be modern, hip and anti-theatre, who no longer trust the old stories told on the stage, but then they actually come up with even more abstruse stories and far more extreme fictions. I think that's a pretty neat reversal. (Deutschlandradio Kultur)
What sweeps you off your feet is not the documented fact that a 81-year old woman decides to end her life. It´s also not that you actually see her lying on the hospitalbed, opening the infusion, letting the deadly poison run into her veins. What really sweeps you off your feet is that Margot decides to spend her last weeks with a theater-collective that is well known for sticking to things like bubble-gum and for creating shows in their style of a radical perfectionlessness. And that she enjoys it. And that in the end it all seems to make sense. (Theater der Zeit, April 2015)
Markus&Markus is a theatre collective from Hildesheim, Germany, active in the field of documentary theatre, exploring in their works the boundaries of reality and fiction and the limits of theatre. Markus&Markus have created performances for the Stückemarkt of the Berliner Theatertreffen, the Freischwimmer Festival and for Theater der Welt. Their productions have been invited to numerous festivals: Frankfurter Positionen, Impuls Mülheim a.d.Ruhr, Spielart München (Munich), Premières in Karlsruhe und Strasbourg, Fast Forward Braunschweig, Perspectives Saarbrücken and Best OFF Niedersachsen. They have also toured internationally: Stage Festival Helsinki, the Ibsen Festival at the National Theatre in Oslo, the Singapore International Festival of Arts, Basel Documentary Platform, Eurothalia Timisoara, and Something Raw in Amsterdam. They have received prizes: the George Tabori Förderpreis, the Jury prize of the “Best OFF − Festival Freier Theater der Stiftung Niedersachsen”, the Jury Prize of the Kapitalismusschredder Festival. Since 2016 they have been receiving funding from the Niedersachsen Ministry of Science and Culture. In 2017 they held a lectureship at the Braunschweig University of Art.
THE FIFTH DAY
The fifth day (June 27) is also the evocation of the border experience. In the festival event we juxtapose different perspectives of seeing the issue of death and dying, and various ways of celebrating the departure: the EASTERN (Eastern Poland and Georgia): community-oriented, based on the power of tradition and means developed by generations, and the WESTERN: undertaking an individual experiment of assisting the process of dying. We will ask questions about our own identity: where are we, which ritual do we feel affinity with, where is the boundary between artistic experiment and transgression, is it possible to create personal rites.
IBSEN: GHOSTS
erformance for adult audience
In play “Ghosts” written by Ibsen, Oswald asks his mother to help him die. Not only her but many societies all over the world doubt as to whether we – the humans – have the right to self-determine about our own death. Markus & Markus met 81-year-old Margot on April 1, 2014 and remained with her during her last days, when she was finishing all the issues important her and bidding farewell to her relatives before she went on her last trip to Switzerland ... Margot was buried on May 22, 2014. Markus & Markus do not provide a solution to the dilemma – they deepen it even further, asking: what should be shown in theatre, how true, how intimate, how serious can it be? Are we voyeurs or witnesses? What should we not talk about? Should we keep silence? In the end, “everything is a theatre” and “nothing is theatre”. At the same time, their performance is a specific monument, a commemoration, a testimony of life of someone who neither they nor the audience knew before, yet who becomes very close to them. There is much more about living than about dying ...
Since 2011 we have made a name for ourselves for our unique and radical form of political theatre. Our performances have brought about public discussions that completely blur the boundaries between performance and reality. Whilst our first trilogy “POLIS3000“ was an agit-prop attack on institutionalised infantility, in the sense of “don't follow us, we don't know any better ourselves“, our current “IBSEN TRILOGY“ has a more personal feel.
The works are characterized by intensive research, whose results are then edited together into films. These video projections form the cornerstone of their live performances. However, the collective is not interested in reproducing reality, instead they focus on the ways in which the stage and reality interact.
It is confrontational, it gets out of hand, and it is – real. It is almost impossible to judge using traditional theatre concepts. The boundary of “this is where the fun stops“ has been destroyed and the freedom that results from that is both frightening and enlightening. One thing is certain: whoever was there, will not forget it.“ (Hildesheimer Allgemeine Zeitung)
What they do differently from many others is that they actually end up taking the fiction very seriously on stage. They are not that interested in the so-called realistic or in the reproduction of reality. Instead they kind of heighten reality using a fictional screen like Ibsen's and then they really turn it up a notch. They appear to be modern, hip and anti-theatre, who no longer trust the old stories told on the stage, but then they actually come up with even more abstruse stories and far more extreme fictions. I think that's a pretty neat reversal. (Deutschlandradio Kultur)
What sweeps you off your feet is not the documented fact that a 81-year old woman decides to end her life. It´s also not that you actually see her lying on the hospitalbed, opening the infusion, letting the deadly poison run into her veins. What really sweeps you off your feet is that Margot decides to spend her last weeks with a theater-collective that is well known for sticking to things like bubble-gum and for creating shows in their style of a radical perfectionlessness. And that she enjoys it. And that in the end it all seems to make sense. (Theater der Zeit, April 2015)
Markus&Markus is a theatre collective from Hildesheim, Germany, active in the field of documentary theatre, exploring in their works the boundaries of reality and fiction and the limits of theatre. Markus&Markus have created performances for the Stückemarkt of the Berliner Theatertreffen, the Freischwimmer Festival and for Theater der Welt. Their productions have been invited to numerous festivals: Frankfurter Positionen, Impuls Mülheim a.d.Ruhr, Spielart München (Munich), Premières in Karlsruhe und Strasbourg, Fast Forward Braunschweig, Perspectives Saarbrücken and Best OFF Niedersachsen. They have also toured internationally: Stage Festival Helsinki, the Ibsen Festival at the National Theatre in Oslo, the Singapore International Festival of Arts, Basel Documentary Platform, Eurothalia Timisoara, and Something Raw in Amsterdam. They have received prizes: the George Tabori Förderpreis, the Jury prize of the “Best OFF − Festival Freier Theater der Stiftung Niedersachsen”, the Jury Prize of the Kapitalismusschredder Festival. Since 2016 they have been receiving funding from the Niedersachsen Ministry of Science and Culture. In 2017 they held a lectureship at the Braunschweig University of Art.