All right. Good night.

In 2014, an airplane disappears from the radar without a trace. Almost at the same time, the father of author and director Helgard Haug begins to exhibit early symptoms of dementia. In her moving text, she combines these two stories and circles the vacancies left by the loss of human presence. Musicians of the Zafraan Ensemble interpret an original soundtrack by Barbara Morgenstern, while the text of this sad and beautiful, resonating concert-theatre show is projected onto a screen.

Statement of the jury

With enquiring, gentle persistence, Helgard Haug combines two very different topics into an extraordinary show: Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared from the radar without a trace on 8 March 2014, carrying 239 passengers, and the almost simultaneous onset of her father’s dementia. In her impressive, thoughtful text, she interweaves these events with each other, connecting her father’s disorientation, the malfunctions in his synapses and his family’s helplessness with the cessation of the transponder signal, the desperate search for pieces of wreckage and the helplessness of the bereaved. As a logical consequence, Haug works mainly with text projections and five musicians of the Zafraan Ensemble. The result is beautiful yet sad, highly concentrated theatre inside the spectator’s head, dedicated to one of life’s greatest issues: the question of disappearance – and death.

Tojuror Katrin Ullmannʼs video statement in the Berliner Festspiele Media Library (in German)