Extra Life

Two siblings are sitting in a car. It is nighttime and they are eating crisps. Slowly and cautiously, they approach a family trauma – the sexual abuse they suffered in childhood. It is the attempt to find expression for something they kept silent about for a very long time and that is stuck inside them like a foreign substance.
Gisèle Vienne’s theatre language is intense; it is an artistic synthesis of choreography, light, sound and space. “Extra Life” painfully penetrates deep-seated layers of consciousness. The trauma of the abused siblings is rendered tangible while simultaneously and eerily addressing the socio-political component of repression.

Statement of the Jury

A bleak no man’s land beyond the outskirts of the city. Clara and Felix are stranded here after a whole night of dancing. The siblings had grown apart but now, for the first time, they are able to talk openly about what Uncle Charly did to them. This much is certain in Gisèle Vienne’s “Extra Life”. Everything else fans out in associative splinters in Yves Godin’s breathtaking lighting design. Over and over, Godin uses individual spotlights and colourful laser beams to create new spaces that never become concrete locations. They mark landscapes of the soul through which Adèle Haenel, Theo Livesey and Katia Petrowick move in slow motion. Thus, Gisèle Vienne and the performers consistently dissolve time as we know it. It does not pass, but rather opens up in many different, diverse directions. Present and past, reality, dreams and nightmares become one. The persistent trauma of the abused children expresses itself in equally poetic and painful images and becomes tangible through art.

Tojuror Sascha Westphal’s video statement in the Berliner Festspiele Media Library (in German)