The first chance encounter: Beatriz arrives at Friedrichstraße Station in East Germany; Laura, who is pregnant, throws up. The second: Laura sees Beatriz’s circus performance and writes a feminist critique.
In the High Middle Ages of the 12th century, disillusioned by the patriarchal structures of her time, the professional minstrel Beatriz de Dia asks Persephone to put her into an 810-year-long slumber. She awakens in 1968, just as her castle in southern France is about to be demolished to make way for a highway and the student protests are raging in Paris. Beatriz had hoped to land in an era of social progress and the realization of third-wave feminism—she rejoiced too soon. From a France that fails to keep its revolutionary promises, Beatriz flies to the GDR on the back of the beautiful Melusine. There she meets Laura Salman, a philology graduate and S-Bahn train conductor, who becomes the playmate Beatriz has longed for…
Inspired by the writer Irmtraud Morgner, Sancha Laura brings together two dissimilar women from seemingly long-gone eras—the Middle Ages and the GDR—who grapple with the unfulfilled promise of an emancipatory future and set off together on a poetic and radically incomprehensible adventure.
The Musiktheaterkollektiv Hauen und Stechen develops its productions in basements and on opera stages and has been creating radically accessible music theater since 2012. Its work blends prominent and obscure music from various genres with influences from theater, opera, film, philosophy, visual arts, and performance.
www.hauen-und-stechen.com
