Theatergruppe Missing Dots und Svea Duwe, Dresden, Oktober, 2019

„You’re stuck“ – André Schallenberg im Gespräch mit missingdots, #1 – 2020

In their production “Land ohne Worte” (Land without Words), the Dresden artist group “missingdots” stages a play by Dea Loher with the artists Julia Amme, Svea Duwe, Nora Otte, Nora Schott and Kristin Mente. In her text from 2007, the award-winning author Dea Loher deals with a journey to Afghanistan that she undertook under the impression of the war that has been reignited since 2001.

How did you come up with this text and why are you interested in working with it?

JA: In 2015 I had a foster child at home, a young Afghan. At the same time I read this text by Dea Loher and thought: this fits now! I don’t experience this war directly, but to this day it is always present through the stories that are told daily in my kitchen. For me, this text reflects a bewilderment that I feel very strongly.

SD: We are so oversaturated and overwhelmed with these images of war, also with our responsibility for it. On the other hand, we have hardly any possibilities to react adequately to it. This is exactly the problem I see in the text. The images hit and touch us, but we are not really involved.

How does the text react to this oversaturation?

NO: The text is a cry for reduction. Dea Loher places herself at the centre of the argument. She doesn’t ask how bad things are for others, but how we relate to them.

SD: You can’t work with this text like with a dough that you knead again properly. For me it has something very sculptural in its structures.

JA: That’s why we stage the text completely, but not in the classical sense. I’m not playing a role, I’m not playing a writer who can no longer write, but I’m completely reduced to an imperfection and brokenness.

So it’s really about us spectators?

SD: It’s about the impossibility of finding words. There is a repetition in the text: “you’re stuck”. That is a very central moment that we are working on. The feeling of being totally emotionally involved, but not actually being able to do anything. Maybe in the end it’s also a lack of drive?

NO: We are less concerned with a staging of the text than with a search for the attitude of the text towards the unspeakable. It always seems a bit strange to me to ask how art can change the world. I think it’s more about using art to question the world. That is already a form of change.

Do 20.02.2020 20:00
Sa 22.02.2020 19:00
So 23.02.2020 19:00
Land ohne Worte 
missingdots (DE)
Theatre/Performance
Coproduktion HELLERAU
Premiere