a play by Travis Jeppesen

directed by Wang Ping-Hsiang

2 – 5 April 2023

Berliner Ringtheater

“They thought I’d been shot to death. But there I was: a failed suicide in Berlin. Capital of the failed suicides. A place you might go and truly die while remaining forever alive. This entire city is full of ghosts in case you’ve never noticed?”

In 1919, just months after the Russian Revolution and the failed German Communist Revolution of 1918/19, the executed body of the Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg was dumped unceremoniously in the Landwehr Canal in Berlin’s city center. One year later, a woman would attempt to end her life by jumping off the Bendlerstrasse bridge into the same canal. Rescued and sent to a mental institution where she refused to give her identity, she was known for a time only as Fräulein Unbekannt – until launching a new career in which she claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, having somehow managed to survive the assassinations of the Russian Revolution…In this wildly imaginative work, the ghosts of these two enigmatic historical figures are joined by a worker ant having been separated from her colony. Left to wander through a Berlin suspended in time between two centuries, with the Landwehr Canal emerging as a symbolic division between the land of the living and the dead, as well as an excavation point for Berlin’s psychogeography, this multi-disciplinary work combines the anarchic linguistic inventiveness of Travis Jeppesen’s writing with dance, sound and video art, all under the direction of Taiwanese theater maverick Wang Ping-Hsiang.

A coproduction between TATWERK and Berliner Ringtheater.Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of NEUSTART KULTUR and by the National Culture and Arts Foundation Taiwan.

Media partner is TAZ. Die Tageszeitung.

World Premiere: 2 April 2023 | 8 p.m.

Further performances: 3 – 5 April 2023 | 8 p.m.

Berliner Ringtheater auf dem Gelände der Alten Münze, Am Krögel 2, 10179 Berlin

Tickets: 15€ / reduced 9 € (plus advance booking fee) available here