Past as Present

• Shirin Sojitrawalla – Moderator

Lennart Kos: IRIDIUM on earth

In the first part of IRIDIUM on earth, a magician couple suffers a stroke of fate: during a show, Buddy loses his sight. They also live together in their private lives and try to cope with the tragic situation. The mysterious metal iridium could help Buddy return to his healthy past. In the second part, we find ourselves on a space mission aiming to bring the rare metal back to Earth. Finally, in the third part, Earth lies in ruins; Buddy is alone, briefly clinging to hope for an intact past. But how desirable is it to cling to yesterday? Lennart Kos writes an imaginative, dialogue-driven play about the joy of human connection—and its tragedy.

Reading with

Niels Bormann and others

Conversation between

Lennart Kos and Necati Öziri

Reason for selection

“With IRIDIUM on earth, Lennart Kos has written a truly astonishing, monumental work. In it, he does not shy away from asking the big questions: Is our fate predetermined? Can the course of events be influenced by individual decisions? What role do interpersonal closeness and solidarity play in the future of our world? Against the backdrop of a rather cool science fiction and outer space scenario, a story unfolds that, in three parts and using the simplest of means, spans universal arcs. The scenes are artfully interwoven, the dialogues—which mostly take place between two partners—are of masterful elegance, and the characters maintain a mystery that defies a simplistic interpretation of the plot.

Buddy and Perceval are a famous magician duo and a couple in private life as well. After an accident during one of their stage shows, Buddy has lost his sight. In their home on the hills above Las Vegas, the couple tries to cope with their new life situation, but Buddy simply cannot come to terms with his fate. He believes in the power of iridium, a mysterious, ancient metal capable of altering the past. In the second part, we accompany astronauts Noah and Thorin on their space mission to bring the iridium back to Earth. In the third part, Earth lies in ruins; Buddy has been left behind, alone, and meets a young woman who may be able to hand him the coveted iridium.”

– Necati Öziri

Dora Yuemin Cheng: Language/Game 语言·游戏

In Language/Game 语言·游戏, Dora Yuemin Cheng seeks an expression against forgetting and the fading of language, memory, and one’s own history. Her mother is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and with it, her own family history in China during the Cultural Revolution threatens to vanish. How do we preserve memories, and how can they be made accessible to a future generation through storytelling and experience? And how does a state influence the narration of history? In a linguistic style all her own, Dora Yuemin Cheng explores the limits of what can be articulated, creating new realms of possibility in a poetic and moving piece.

Reading with

Niels Bormann and others

Conversation between

Dora Yuemin Cheng and Ferdinand Schmalz

Reason for Selection

“In Dora Yuemin Cheng’s *Language/Game* (*语言·游戏*), a young author living between Shanghai and Berlin searches for her very own language, her individual style, and her own story, while her mother’s story fades away. The onset of Alzheimer’s threatens to erase the memory of her mother’s childhood in China during the Cultural Revolution. Language, which also repeatedly appears as a character in its own right, fights here against a forgetting that is always twofold. On the one hand, personal forgetting; on the other, the state’s historical narrative, which is built on the deliberate forgetting of the dark sides of the Cultural Revolution. Spanning this arc from 1960s and 1970s China to the present day, the play takes on a multifaceted, often lighthearted form, where the mother’s chamber pot might suddenly start speaking or Uncle Mao might mistake himself for Putin. Against this backdrop—a visual representation of memory—the ghosts of history appear in all their unresolved torment.”

– Ferdinand Schmalz

(Readings in German, discussions in German with English translation)