In this musical lecture-performance, a collective of Trobadoras wanders through the archives of May ’68 in Paris, the Prague Spring, and the opposition movements of the GDR. In pursuit of fantastical visions of the future and driven by a desire to reinvent life, they take to the barricades, where they once again raise songs of political resistance.
The medieval trobairitz Beatriz de Dia awakens after an 800-year slumber, while the student protests are raging in Paris in the spring of 1968. Hoping for social progress and gender equality, she sets out in search of the dragon Tarasque and the beautiful Melusine. Her journey through southern France leads her into precarious circumstances: As an undocumented migrant, she is forced into illegal labour and prostitution on a construction site, ends up in a psychiatric hospital, and eventually in a bourgeois marriage to a greengrocer. Caught in the contradictions of reality, she misses the May ’68 uprising in Paris in a bitter twist of fate. And yet, the headstrong trobadora clings to the possibility of a different life – an act of defiant affirmation of life.
How could the poetry of the streets be told in the GDR? And above all, how can we still sing about it today? In pursuit of fantastical visions of the future and driven by the desire to reinvent life, the Trobadoras take to the barricades built from the wreckage of vegetable shops, giving voice to old and new songs of political resistance. BEATRIZ 1968 is a novel adaptation, an immersive historical spectacle, a forum for questions, a concert, and an occupation all at once.
The Music theater collective Hauen und Stechen stands for a poetic, multifaceted and wild theatrical language that marks a political and idiosyncratic position in music theater.
