Rita Klaus

A piece for performers and ghosts, Rita Klaus dresses the past in temporal drag (Elizabeth Freeman) in an affective, illusory, and critical take on remembrance. Transforming the theatre into a container for remains and for what happens in the ruins of collapsed time, Rita Klaus applies Mark Fisher’s concept of ‘hauntology’ onto the theatre apparatus: the ghost appears as figure, structure, and visitor for the artists to produce a present that is perennially haunted, the future canceled. 

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Some time ago, a person lived and died. We never met this person, nor did we ever see her, not even her grave. We know she existed only by what she left behind, and the first thing we learnt about her was her name: Rita Klaus. She was her own archivist, she kept everything ‘safe’, she saved everything. Analogue. We found her archive by accident in the faraway tropical semi-desert. 

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Fusing experimental dance, live music, and text, Rita Klaus takes queer temporality and its associated concepts into overdrive, producing a zone outside of time where discrete moments of someone’s life re-emerge and new relations between artefact, memory, and personhood are mined again and again —the remnants of which leak into an aestheticized fraying of performativity. 

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‘‘Four Stars. Finally there is hard punk again in a dance performance’’

—Frank Schmid for RBB Kultur Radio

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Concept, choreography, performance: Martin Hansen / Co-creation, performance: Xenia Taniko / Dramaturgy, text: Mila Pavicevic / Sound, composition, performance: Brandon Johnson / Light design: Gretchen Blegen / Set design: Julian Weber / Costume: Evan Loxton / Production: Giulia Messia. Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds in coproduction with Radial System Berlin.