2020: The Tempest – live streaming and talk

Post-performance live talk organized by Münchner Kammerspiele.

Based on William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”

The story is quite simple: a high (or not so high) profile female or male is forced to quit her / his position, power, city and country where she / he lives. Together with a son / daughter they flee to an island. They will live there for over twelve years. By chance (or as a result of a storm) a group of her/his old acquaintances end up (or not) on the same island. People, who have saved (or not) her/his life and those, who have engineered (or not) her/his downfall.  
Professor Tadeusz Sławek in his book “NICowanie świata. Zdania z Szekspira” [“Turning the World Inside OUT. The Phrases from Shakespeare“] writes that in an attempt to “think a human” one has to extract a person from his/her customarily assigned place and transfer him/her to a totally different place. This is also how William Shakespeare poses his questions; he repeats the act of expulsion: expulsion from paradise, expulsion from a city (“The Tempest”), expulsion from life, expulsion from a family (“King Lear”), expulsion from a country (“Coriolanus”). Without the circumstances of “being exiled”, one cannot “think a human”.
What does “to think a human anew” mean nowadays, when the only available tools to carry out this process are instruments created by humans in all their imperfection, based on knowledge and imagination – both having its source in the most imperfect instrument: human memory?  
Is human perspective the only possible one?

photos by Monika Stolarska

Support from the COVID-19 Counteract Fund.