Erniedrigte und Beleidigte (The Insulted and Humiliated)

Jury Statement

In a looming mist, stirring music resounds and people storm to the edge of the stage. They haul in ladders and begin to create a gigantic picture with black and white paint – higher and higher, layer upon layer. A wheeled hospital bed revolves in front of it and actors in swishing crinolines and black top-hats present ostensibly incoherent and recurring scenes from Dostoevsky’s serialised novel “The Insulted and Humiliated” about an egotistical patriarch, abandoned children and crushing mountains of debt. It takes a while for the audience to find their bearings around the improvisation modules of Sebastian Hartmann’s Dresden production. Almost programmatic in character, the production is interwoven with Wolfram Lotz’ Hamburger Poetikvorlesung (lecture of poetics), outlining principles for a new theatre and performed in a spoken dance by Yassin Trabelsi with a fine sensitivity for sound. Hartmann’s staging is not a linear retelling of the novel’s plot, but rather – and this is already inherent in Dostoevski – aspires to an ecstatic dissolution of sense and logos of the kind that can be experienced in illness, love and, in this case, in art.