Artist Talk
DO WE STILL WANT TO REMEMBER? - AFTERLIVES OF HISTORY IN THEATRE by Kai Tuchmann

Thu, 24.01.2019
6:30 PM Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Bangalore

Followed by a conversation with Anuja Ghosalkar and Chanakya Vyas.

“Do you still remember?”

German theatre director Heiner Müller considered this question the most crucial of all when it comes to this unique assembly we call theatre. During this assembly, the act of memory is a permanently-contested site, where the temporalities of the past, present and future intersect.

Central to German dramaturge Kai Tuchmann`s presentation is the notion of afterlife - as developed by Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg. A notion that, once turned to the realm of theatre, implies that the theatrical repetitions of the past affirm the capacity of quotations to expand our being beyond the limits of a “homogenous and empty time” - Walter Benjamin.
Through excerpts of his works Great, that you made it here! and Red, Kai will introduce his approach towards documentary techniques and a particular kind of theatre that uses, as its point of departure, the problem of how to represent and perform history.

Great, that you made it here! used the field research of master students of cultural anthropology to investigate the historic and present condition of the German refugee camp in Friedland.

Red is based on the revolutionary model ballet Red Detachment of Women. It utilises the embodied memories of four Chinese dancers to revisit this iconic ballet in times of cultural revolution.

After the talk, Kai Tuchmann and Bangalore-based actor-writer Anuja Ghosalkar will be in conversation with playwright Chanakya Vyas on the contested lines between fact and fiction and the changing idea of evidence gathering.