Schilda, or The Thing About Stupidity

They agree on a collective “pretend-as-if” strategy: Whether a town hall needs to be built, the mayor’s office needs to be filled, or a field needs to be tilled, they eagerly set to work. However, in doing so, they leave all their talents and knowledge out of the equation. In this way, they successfully ruin their good reputation and become famous. By always approaching a problem in such a way that the attempt to solve it is replaced by a new problem, they also never have to carry old problems around with them.

Third-year acting students at the Rostock University of Music and Theater take the medieval *Lalebuch* and the collection of farces based on it, *Die Schildbürger*, as the starting point for a summer theater production that falls somewhere between an experimental setup and a spectacle

: Instead of artificial intelligence, they’re interested in artificial stupidity. Rather than letting “enshittification” put them in a bad mood, they collectively commit to a cheerful “Schildbürger-style” improvement. With their own logic and a penchant for disaster, they explore what happens when a community decides to play dumb—and follows through on it.

IN GERMAN