inkl. 2025: Altbau in zentraler Lage

Since she works nights, Zoey is only vaguely aware that serious changes are taking place in her home. She has always ignored her landlord's offers of compensation if she moves out, knowing full well that it will be nearly impossible to find a new apartment in her neighborhood. But more and more people are moving out of the building around her, and ghosts tend to appear more frequently when the property is vacant.


As she returns home from work one day at dawn, she suddenly hears music that wraps itself around her limbs like vines in an immense lake. Unfortunately, her landlord isn't even thinking about ghost hunting. Rather, he sees a massive ghost infestation as an opportunity to request a controlled burndown of the building so he can then rebuild and sell it at a high price. Zoey defends herself against the ghosts' acoustic attacks with loud techno music from her stereo system – much to the chagrin of her neighbor Trisha. She doesn't notice the ghost music, but she does notice the bass from next door, in the middle of the night.


In her commissioned work for the Schauspiel Leipzig, Raphaela Bardutzky recounts the everyday horror of the housing market crisis, blending aesthetics from gothic opera, pulp fiction, and club culture.


Like her play "Fischer Fritz," "Altbau in zentraler Lage" explores the relationship between language and power – and offers two different languages a shared stage: in this case, German spoken language and German Sign Language.



(IN GERMAN)