Blutbuch

When his grandmother – or Großmeer, as author Kim de l’Horizon calls her in Swiss German – is diagnosed with dementia, non-binary narrator Kim sees themselves confronted with their family history. During the process of writing, Kim dives deep into their own past, looking for a way out of their mother’s and grandmother’s silence and towards their own identity and physicality. Jan Friedrich translates the varied stylistics of the novel – which received both the German and the Swiss Book Award – into an equally multi-facetted theatrical language, eschewing lineal narrative structures and still managing to merge text and image into a unit. Emotionally touching live videos and acted scenes are interwoven with sophisticated language sounds. The story that emerges from this mosaic is a personal one, and yet it also talks about revolting against the constraints of social standardisation.

Statement of the Jury

With great urgency, Jan Friedrich and his team bring Kim de l’Horizon’s queer liberation story to the stage. This becomes evident in every poetically delicate, funny, fairytale-and-popculture-like and brutal detail of this multi-media production. It takes the award-winning novel at its word and yet creates a world entirely of its own. The production of “Blutbuch” from Magdeburg finds astonishing images for every chapter, every literary tone and every emotion, without ever losing track of the narrative. This balancing act is achieved because the seven fantastic performers form a personal connection with this relentless questioning of self and society, and with the strong yearning for belonging felt by all the multiple Kims in the novel and onstage. It is a show about non-binary identities which proposes a variant of non-binary storytelling. And about trauma, pain and prejudices that we all inherit from our ancestors. It has powerful imagery, a fighting spirit and releases happiness hormones.

Tojuror Sabine Leucht’s video statement on “Blutbuch” (in German)

ProgrammeBooklet (pdf, 1 MB)