The two productions Das eingebildete Tier and Ein anderes Blau were created together: in their complementarity they refer to one another and yet can also be experienced independently. Because of this twin character, they can be seen on certain days as double performances. A shared intermission — with bread, soup, and a drink offered to the audience — links the two productions on those days into a special event.

An absurdly comic language spectacle, seeking to breathe fresh life into entrenched conditions, is answered with silence and stillness, and ends in collective song. Ecstasy meets quietude, wild outpouring meets meditation. Hilariously funny and heartbreakingly sad. An ensemble, a space, a musician, and two directors who encounter one another artistically, and with the ensemble search for ways to counter the violence of an accelerated present with radically different, utopian festivals of play.

Das eingebildete Tier (DEA)

An ecstatic spectacle of humanity

Humans. Animals. Chaos. Wild circus. Light and pleasure. Uprising. Transformation. Valère Novarina’s texts are true hell-mixers, making the never-ending adventure of language palpable as an autonomous force — worldly, brimming with unrestrained wit. In France, Novarina is celebrated as the great theater-maker of our time, selling out theaters across the country for weeks on end, while for German theater he still remains a discovery. More than enough reason to stage, for the very first time in Germany, a major work by this extraordinary author and theater artist!

Humankind possesses a very special instrument that makes it, above all other creatures, the master of utopia: from its mouth it ceaselessly emits language, through which it is capable of expressing the most impossible and outlandish things. With speech, it summons forth everything that does not (yet) exist. With language, this “imaginary animal” that it is, throws all its might against death: to the ceaseless threat of nothingness, it opposes EVERYTHING — and invites us to watch on stage as unheard-of sounds, tones, and words emerge from imagination.

The great French theater-maker Molière wrote and performed The Imaginary Invalid right up until his actual death on the boards that, as the saying goes, “mean the world.” In a similarly absurd and frenetic parade, a vivid troupe of nine performers now gathers at Theater an der Ruhr to reveal to us the full power of the “imaginary animal”: through dance and music, with despair and comedy, they surrender themselves to language and create a world we have never before seen or heard — a utopia.

Ein anderes Blau (UA)

At the beginning of Novalis' novel fragment Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the young Heinrich dreams of a blue flower, which became the central motif of longing in Romanticism. It symbolizes the quest for knowledge of nature and, consequently, of the self. Later, the blue flower is humanized in Heinrich's encounter with Mathilde. The two fall in love and from that moment on accompany each other across the thresholds of reality and beyond death.

“Ein anderes Blau” takes up this symbolism and transposes it into the present. Can the depression and fear of doom of the present be countered with imagination that transcends thresholds?

A group of people, equipped with nothing but their bodies, embark on a journey through the last hour of their existence. They seek the other blue in the sea, in beautiful death, in political action, in embrace, in empathy, and in each other's company. Together they fail at the thresholds of their existence, together they cross them and dream themselves into paradise.

When will humanity's attempts to confront death with technology, as demanded once again today by tech-utopian manifestos, seem more ridiculous than the romantic call to embrace death, farewell, and longing? In the face of the death of civilization and climate catastrophe, the evening calls for farewell—not in melancholy, but as a call for cooperation.

Conceived as a response to the evening “Das eingebildete Tier” (The Conceited Animal), which deals with humanity's desperate attempt to express itself through language, “Ein anderes Blau” (Another Blue) explores the moment when even the veil of language falls away, developing its narrative almost solely from the presence of the bodies. read less