Bastards
In Bastards, the theatre is just an abandoned construction site sculpted with voids and fissures. Ania Nowak, Cécile Bally and Martin Hansen move through this wasted landscape, one composed of forgotten presences and accelerated time. They invoke the once radical gestures of disruption, destruction and resistance, collapsing their very particular histories into the present moment; in search of traces of revolutionary promise.
We are going to take history and replace it with the void, a new ground zero from which we can critique the present and offer a new future.
An anthology of nothingness. The end of history.
Martin Hansen’s work is primarily concerned with possibilities of reframing history and economies of time in the theatre. If we accept that the past is not a solid, immutable fact but rather subject to constant re-writing, what are the conditions that it is read through?
Laura, the protagonist of Chris Marker’s movie Level 5, talks about virtual reality as if it were a battleground. A place when one encounters ghosts and errors. The game that she is working on attempts to change the outcome of the Battle of Okinawa, the last campaign of World War II. As she is cyberwalking, she meets her dead lover.
The artists work primarily with documents they have found on the internet. Seeing how this endless archive speaks back to the past and transforms it frame by frame. Somewhere at the bottom of the deep web dance history is just a pile of bytes. A short, silent, looping, untitled moving image.
Concept and direction: Martin Hansen With and by: Ania Nowak and Cecile Bally Dramaturgy: Mateusz Szymanowka Light Design: Gretchen Blegen Design: Melanie Jame Wolf Production: Andrea Oberfeld/Ehrlicher Arbeit
Bastards is produced by Martin Hansen in co-production with SOPHIENSÆLE. The production is funded with the kind support of the Governing Mayor of Berlin - Senate Chancellery - Cultural Affairs with support from Clement Layes/Public in Private.
