AUSTRIA / 2019
Svenja Viola Bungarten – Garland
The play was proposed by Schauspielhaus Graz / Austria for the ETC Drama Committee
It could be Mars. An area outside Madrid. The Mojave Desert. Or the Sahara. But let's not forget where we are. We are in Germany. In America near Penig, district of Central Saxony, to be precise. And the catastrophe is everywhere: the country is a blazing oven, the earth is withering, houses are burning down, there has been no wind for months. And there is no tornado far and wide to save the crisis-ridden characters from their fate.
But there is a girl named Dorothee Sturm, and she has set her mind on nothing less than saving the world. Too bad she seems to attract misfortune. Em and Henri can tell you a thing or two about that. They are not the parenting type, they are the farming type and lost first their dignity and then their farm in a fire. While the desperate policeman Gus Brandt sets out on the trail of the suspected arsonist, he in turn is sought by his brother, the filmmaker Salvatore Brandt. He is interviewed, overworked and underpaid, by Lorna Luft, host of the radio programme HOT TIMES. How a gigantic truck comes into the game and why Judy Garland, of all people, shines behind the counter of a petrol station - GARLAND also tells about that.
Download an overview of the play and the author below, including an extract in English and the full play in the original language.
DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLYAUSTRIA / 2022
Magdalena Schrefel – What ignites, what burns
The play is part of the Pipelines project, and was created in collaboration with Schauspielhaus Graz
In the subsoil of Europe, a branched circulatory system of crude oil is relaxing. Pipelines run through the continent like lifelines and fuel our hunger for energy. Despite all efforts, global oil production has increased continuously over the past fifty years. Nothing, it seems, can stop the catastrophic cycle.
"What ignites, what burns" is about two young women who try anyway. The Kleist Prize winner Magdalena Schrefel has taken on the Austrian part and designed a theatrical road movie along the Adria-Vienna pipeline. It shows the journey of its two heroines across Austria and the endless expanses of the Internet and describes their encounters with climate activists, various eccentric figures of the fossil age and their radicalization: How can narrative means blow up a pipeline?
The play premiered in Schauspielhaus Graz in January 2022, staged by German director Marie Bues.
DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLYFRANCE / 2018
Mariette Navarro – Zone à étendre
The play was proposed by La Mousson d’été / France for the ETC Drama Committee
We first follow a group of people walking side by side along a forest path. They get to know each other as they progress through the forest and share pieces of their history, their convictions, their doubts and hopes, while the forest revives feelings buried within them in an immemorial relationship to legends and magic. All these people have a different reason for joining the march, but that they are all doing it to take a step aside from the power in place, a power they no longer identify with or they no longer want to support. They are, in fact, on their way to a clearing where a community they wish to join has been established.
Download an overview of the play and the author below, including an extract in English and the full play in the original language.
DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLYALBANIA / 2021
Elsa Demo – Grayish Green Into Black
The play is part of the Pipelines project, and was created in collaboration with the National Theatre of Albania
One winter day, an oil well bursts, in the triangle between the houses, the village cemetery and the ghost cinema. The house, the cemetery, the cinema, come as witnesses of a time that is older than the one the contemporary family lives in. Thus times join the wings, the past echoes the present, places echo people to say that the need for survival controls and challenges the spiritual needs within people of same kin, who are also the miniature of a polarized society.
DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLYMALTA / 2022
Simone Spiteri – Wolf/Sheep
The play is part of the Pipelines project, and was created in collaboration with Teatru Malta
The fuel industry is fueled by corruption, corruption fuels the fuel company. Corruption fuels us all and we fuel it back. Even if we don't think we do, or refuse to accept that we do. Wolf/Sheep is a play about this vicious cycle: a massive iceberg, not its tip ... we all know who those people up there are, but its base is Us. You. Me. And how we all, by doing nothing or thinking there is nothing to do, have allowed these things to happen. Things of all sorts: the trivial, the inconsequential, but the horrific too.
Malta loves a nationwide blackout. Despite very recent state-of-the-art new fuel storage systems. But lack of actual light every now and then is not the only thing keeping us in the dark. Allegorical, satirical, political ... the play evaluates, observes and pushes the limits of a country (perhaps a world?) that can be as surreal as it is confused, noisy, passive, passionate and chaotic. Ultimately, we are all anesthetized, by the wolf, maybe? But the real question is what kind of fuel is our new opium and who are the real wolves and the real sheep?
The play will premiere at Teatru Malta in the season 2022/2023.
DOCUMENT AVAILABLE TO ETC MEMBERS ONLY
