humanistää!

In “die humanisten”, two Nobel Prize winners meet and are convinced that they have scaled the summits of intellectual life. “Aus der Fremde”, on the other hand, focuses on the realities of life as an author. Claudia Bauer’s musical theatre production is full of powerful imagery and brings the highly musical, strictly structured and yet explosive texts by Austrian language artist Ernst Jandl to the stage with an outstanding ensemble. They are supported by Peer Baierlein’s score, which was composed specifically for this production.

Statement of the jury

In “humanistää!”, the full-length play “Aus der Fremde” constitutes the narrative framework for a beautiful overabundance of texts by Ernst Jandl. With her eclectic approach, Claudia Bauer endeavours to revive Jandl’s idiom for the stage, both diverse and eminently suitable for the theatre. Using repetitions and shifting meanings, the poet Ernst Jandl laboured to make sense of reality. It is therefore only logical that the staging at Volkstheater relies on repetitions and the resulting breaches of perception. In “Aus der Fremde”, an auto-fictional text about a poet couple, the characters consistently talk in the third person and use only the conjunctive mood. With its masks, wigs and offstage dialogues, Jandl’s text transforms into a strangely impersonal and yet apposite portrayal. As a play within the play, the Volkstheater-production adds the one-act play “die humanisten”: miserable, wailing men, condemned to brute comedy. That Bauer is just as able to strike more quiet notes becomes evident in “deutsches gedicht”. The director intersperses larger text elements with Jandl-passages, staged miniatures that aim to entertain. “humanistää!” – a celebration of Jandl.

Tojuror Petra Paternoʼs video statement in the Berliner Festspiele Media Library (in German)