A post-heroic debt cantata
by Thomas Köck
WORLD PREMIEREDirected by Thomas Köck & Elsa-Sophie Jach
Premiere
November 9, 2017 An inheritance! In his debt cantata for a choir of young people and an actress
Thomas Köck is reflecting on the individual and collective inheritance.
A night in the far future: a sleepless
child in front of a screen. On the screen a report about old times. Archaeologists have made a spectacular discovery. Buried
deep down in the desert sand, they found a strange bundle of sheets, documents of a since long extinct culture. But the scientists
cannot read this prehistoric book. It is written in a language that is completely unrelated to any known language. How can
one translate this text that could reveal so much about a foreign culture? Finally the explorers find a woman who is the last
survivor and who might be able to read the book. Chain smoking, the old lady starts reporting about the past, with a chuckle
she tells from a different world. A culture that doesn’t know any difference between future and present time or past. She
describes a cosmos of concurrency. Also a society where brightness is the greatest good, but that is lead to the edge of demise
by its insatiable desire for light. Will lead? Or has already lead? What time and culture is the chain smoker actually talking
about?
Again in a different time. An inheritance, for a group of young people. A choir. Well-off, educated
in many ways and supposedly having the best chances, they grow up – are they the new elite in a safe distance from the world’s
devastations? The direction of their future seems to be defined. Yet looking at their own timeline catastrophes, system failures,
wars and violence characterize the presence. Their origin assigns family tasks to them that are as auspicious as challenging
that cannot be rejected offhand. They grow up in a world of infinite possibilities. Your biography has to be as perfect as
possible in order to survive the competition. The absolute freedom threatens to become a burden. The biographies of their
parents still held the capitalistic promise of social advancement – if you followed the rules of the system, you could hope
to be protected from the insecure down sides of capitalistic society, if only you functioned so well that you managed to acquire
the necessary financial cushion. Yet the babyboomer generation of social climbers has also left a mortgage in the shape of
a gigantic national debt to its children. In addition, those who grow up in the early 21st century are confronted with the
burden of a fast warming world climate. It is unsure if the threatening rising of the sea level might one day question the
privileges of there sheltered life in Middle Europe. So what are the chances of this inheritance? Can it be turned down? Have
the young people got the same perspectives as their parents? Or is there not enough future for everyone? Köck lets the group
fall apart more and more.
A woman is wandering through her parents‘ house in the night. The time passes without dreams
and a thought is ripening: The thought of murder. Does one have to anticipate time? She is looking for revenge, wants to get
what belongs to her allegedly. Does one have to fight ones own inheritance? At one point the question will come up in 5th
Avenue, if blood has to change the run of events.Can violence only be ended by violence? Will there be a future without bloodshed?
Schauspielhaus and Thomas Köck are connected through a close continuous collaboration, since the first world
premiere of one of his plays in Austria was produced with „Strotter“ (directed by Tomas Schweigen). Since then Thomas Köck
has become one of the most important young voices of German language drama. Meanwhile his play „Paradies fluten“ – for which
he was awarded with the Kleist-Förderpreis for young writing in 2016 – has been staged at various theatres, e.g this season
at Burgtheater. His linguistic philosophical tilme reflection „Die Zukunft reicht uns nicht (Klagt, Kinder, klagt!“) is after
„Strotter“ and „Kudlich“ the third play that will have its world premiere at Schauspielhaus Vienna – also Thomas Köck will
direct for the first time (together with Elsa-Sophie Jach).
The director Elsa-Sophie Jach, born in Vorwerk
in 1991, studied directing at Theaterakademie Hamburg and theatre writing at UdK Berlin. Workshop productions of her texts
e.g. at Deutsches Theater Berlin. She directed e.g. at 100º at Ballhaus Ost, Kampnagel and Schauspielhaus Hamburg. Together
with a group of young people and an actress, Köck and Jach are questioning the inescapability, the lack of alternatives of
our present. They show history as as a space of possibilities and remind of the variability oft he world, demand resistance
against the times past and coming.
BIBLIOTHEK
Thomas
Köck »Subject: A letter from August 7th, 2018« (PDF)»Laudatio
zur Verleihung des Mülheimer Dramatikerpreises 2018 an Thomas Köck« von Tobias Schuster (PDF)»Im
Prinzip schreibe ich immer noch Songtexte, nur sind sie jetzt etwas länger und oft chorisch« Thomas Köck im Gespräch
mit Tobias Schuster (PDF)
