Tips for the 2024 / 25 theater season in Hanover
🍂⛅️Wir Everyone is feeling it right now - it's getting dark outside earlier and the evenings invite you to make yourself comfortable indoors. ☕️ So why not swap the sofa for a theater seat?
Because the theater stages in Hanover really have something to offer this fall. Rousing dramas, humorous comedies or even crass productions - there's guaranteed to be something for everyone!
There are many fantastic theaters in Hanover: The Schauspielhaus, the State Opera or the smaller, charming stages such as the Theater an der Glocksee, the Theater am Küchengarten and many, many more! The 2024/25 season offers a colorful mix of classics and brand new plays that you shouldn't miss.✨
So, what are you waiting for? Your fall theater experience is waiting!
Salome
A biblical thriller: Salome falls in love with John the Baptist, but he refuses to succumb to the strong-willed princess's desires. Their paths end fatally. Oscar Wilde turned the story of Salome and the imprisoned anarchist into a scandalous one-act play, and Richard Strauss turned it into a musical psychological thriller. In almost two breathlessly hot, colorful hours of opera, the boundary to greed, to intoxicatingly uncontrolled, Dionysian drive is crossed several times.
BODYTALK // HOST CLUB – Last Art Standing
Bodytalk is a politically engaged dance theater collective founded in 2008 by Yoshiko Waki and Rolf Baumgart that develops regional, often radically local productions with live music. Based in Münster, the multi-award-winning ensemble is known for its innovative, participatory projects, which often involve public space and local communities. The collective is currently in residence at the EISFABRIK, where the piece "HOST CLUB - Last Art Standing" is being developed. Inspired by Japanese host clubs, the dance theater explores the boundaries between entertainment, art and intimacy and poses the question of how new forms of shared experience can emerge after the pandemic. In an interactive setting, the audience becomes part of a lively happening that interweaves dance, performance and gender politics.
Satyagraha
Opera by Philip Glass How can we confront injustice in society? Mahatma Gandhi, the famous Indian freedom fighter, developed a spiritual answer to this question as a young lawyer in South Africa: "Satyagraha", the adherence to the truth. The truth is propagated here as the most effective means in the fight against injustice; the opposing side is to be convinced by peaceful means, through non-violent resistance. Philip Glass has dedicated an emphatic work of art to this idea with his great choral opera Satyagraha: his catchy minimal music transports us to other spheres of consciousness, the timeless verses from the Bhagavadgita invite us to contemplate - an inspiring experience.
Hier spricht die Polizei
The police embody the state's monopoly on the use of force like no other institution and are therefore the only ones authorized to exercise physical coercion. To this end, they can interfere extensively with the fundamental rights of citizens protected by the constitution. It is therefore no wonder that police violence in particular is always a controversial issue, which is also nourished by left-wing stereotypes and has recently been the subject of massive debate during operations such as the evacuation of the occupied village of Lützerath. Nevertheless, police officers enjoy a great deal of trust among large sections of the population. This ambivalent perception will be explored in this research-based project by werkgruppe2.
Leonora - Milch der Träume
Immerse yourself with us in the surrealist world of the extraordinary painter and writer Leonora Carrington, where performance, installation and art merge into a tribute to the work of this visionary artist. The boundaries between dream and reality are blurred in this production. The audience can expect an intense experience in which they wander through the artist's mythical dream worlds. Combining theater, visual art, dance and music, we embark on a journey into Carrington's complex and mysterious inner world, encounter fantastic creatures and let ourselves be enchanted by the deep symbolism of the works.
Die Marquise von O...
How should one live with the knowledge that where love lives, violence is also at home? War, assault and powerlessness are the beginning of a story that tells of a rift in the world. The estate of the Marquise of O... is attacked. She is threatened, but a captain from the ranks of the enemy rescues her. Weeks later, she is plagued by malaise and a premonition. After several examinations, it is clear that she is pregnant - without knowing how or by whom. Kleist places his characters on a stretched bed of sensations: Fact and consciousness tear at them. The self, the other, the world - everything seems to be in question.
König Lear
"Alas, I do not wear my heart on my sleeve, nor love on my platter," Cordelia dares to say to her father, King Lear. He had previously asked his three daughters to pledge their love to him so that he could divide land, power and responsibility between them accordingly. Now his vanity has been severely wounded and he only wants to entrust Regan and Goneril with his inheritance, who have almost outdone each other in their declarations of love. In his adaptation, Thomas Melle intensifies the conflict over power and the renunciation of power in the quarrel between the generations. He remains close to Shakespeare's original, but sharpens the question: is change possible or is power a system to which people fall regardless of age and gender?
Der kleine Prinz
An airplane crashes in the middle of the Sahara. Its pilot survives. Now he is stranded in the desert. He is joined by a child from an alien planet - the little prince. He has left his home planet in a quarrel and is now traveling through space. Here he encounters figures whose desires are money, domination, intoxication or admiration. "The great people are decidedly very astonishing ...", he realizes and remains a stranger in this cosmos. A dark universe reveals itself to us and to him. It is the story of a being who can wonder and who has something to counter the omnipresent forlornness and hopelessness. Perhaps the little prince is the friend we have to invent in order to survive in our world. Lilja Rupprecht will stage the story as a touching end-time drama for adults. With Werther, Woyzeck and Peer Gynt, she has already created great interrogators of our reality for Hanover. With The Little Prince, she adds a special kind of seeker to this series: he is lost and at the same time connected to the world - endowed with an imagination that takes us into unknown realms of the soul.
Universen: Landsfrau
On August 26, 2021, the last evacuation flight of the German Armed Forces leaves Kabul Airport. It takes off and disappears on the horizon. And with it, Afghanistan disappears, even for Ariana. What the German-Afghan protagonist Ariana has left in her countrywoman are memories. As the last plane takes off, her thoughts and impressions unfold. Biographical episodes, nostalgia and fantasy stories, Afghan music and choreographic elements - through Ariana, these intertwine like a collage and become fleeting images of an Afghanistan that perhaps never existed. Ariana contrasts the overrepresented Western positions, images and narratives about Afghanistan with her own, diasporic ones. She overwrites and changes them, thereby creating an intimate and political space that cannot be taken away from her. Simultaneously confronted with a feeling of guilt about her own "peaceful" everyday life, the solo evening Landsfrau paints a multi-layered and detailed picture of life in the diaspora - including its problems and privileges.
Das kunstseidene Mädchen
18-year-old Doris wants to become a "glamour" and stop working in the provinces as a secretary to a pushy lawyer. So she moves to Berlin and experiences the frenzy of the late Golden Twenties. Doris strives for independence and fame, but repeatedly comes up against the boundaries of convention. She gets involved in affairs and tries to launch a stage career, but nothing works out. The dark side of the metropolis awaits Doris, as does the promise of fame and glamor. Keun was an enormous success with the public when it was first published in 1932. Today, Das kunstseidene Mädchen with its self-confident protagonist is one of the classics of modern literature. Director Luise Voigt will bring the contradictions and glitter of the big city to the stage in Hanover in a visually stunning way.
Goethes Faust – allerdings mit anderem Text und auch anderer Melodie
"Here you come and ask what idea I tried to embody in my Faust. As if I knew and could express it myself!" Barbara Bürk and Clemens Sienknecht will now attempt to explain what Goethe himself could not or would not. With the subtitle, but with different lyrics and a different melody, the two have already transported some of the great classics of world literature into their very own format: condensed in terms of content, humorously deconstructed and lovingly musicalized. After Madame Bovary (2016), the two are now tackling Goethe's heavyweight Faust in Hanover: A fateful pact with the devil, the Gretchen question and the search for the moment of absolute happiness.
BLINDGÄNGER
Some 80 years after the end of the Second World War, we still walk, sleep, live and love on its legacy: unexploded ordnance. They lie dormant among us like an encapsulated pain that comes to the surface from time to time and triggers tremendous things. For the project development, an artistic team led by project manager Lena Kußmann explores what it actually takes to defuse explosive situations. A musician, a dancer, two performers, a media artist and artists in exile slip into velvet gloves and create poetic images, research, weld together, caress, beat on them and make the old destroyers resound - while new ones are already falling elsewhere. "We are the ones who can't learn from our mistakes" - A demolition expert
Hokus & Pokus
Ballet by Jeroen Verbruggen Together, the young magician Hokus and his witch sister Pokus invent what is probably the most famous magic spell in the world: "Hokus Pokus Fidibus!". But it is only effective if the two of them say it together. As Hokus becomes increasingly jealous of the talented Pokus, disaster takes its course ... Between historical events and fairytale fiction, Belgian choreographer Jeroen Verbruggen tells the story of people who used to be called "witches". With a stage aesthetic somewhere between a dark fairy tale, rousing opulence and magical effects, Verbruggen creates a parable about being different in today's society.
Katharsis BETTINA PALETTA / EMRE KESIM
"Katharsis" is an improvisation project by choreographer and dancer Bettina Paletta and musician Emre Kesim that combines dance, live music and lighting design to create an intense and unique performance. Over two evenings, artists with diverse backgrounds, stories and forms of expression come together to create an unpredictable, in-the-moment live performance. Each 45-minute performance is unique, unfolding through the interplay of dance, music and light, using improvisation as a creative strategy to fully engage with the moment, explore with the other artists what needs to be expressed and shape what happens on stage as a collective experience. The audience is invited to embark on an emotional journey without feeling the pressure to understand or interpret what is being performed. Instead, a space is created in which feelings and sensations take center stage, touching and opening us up inside.
Prima Facie
As a criminal defense lawyer, Tessa Ensler is unbeatable. Every day she defends men who are on trial for sexual assault. Tessa has made use of the system: she knows how best to get ahead. However, after experiencing an assault by a colleague herself, Tessa questions everything she has believed in up to that point. She now has to go to the other side of the courtroom and testify as a witness for the prosecution. Can victims of violence ever get justice in a system made by men for men? Through her award-winning monologue, author Suzie Miller gives voice to a woman who refuses to be intimidated and fights on.
You can find more great plays here!
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