ARMIN PETRAS (Deutschland)
"mach die augen zu und fliege oder krieg böse 5"

World Premiere/Work in progress

São Paulo 2003: Theatre director Armin Petras observed blind people, watching how they moved in their everyday lives. To him, it seemed like life in a state of war - an image that continued to haunt him. While searching for a suitable metaphor, Petras came across the German picaresque novel "Simplicissimus, The Adventurous" by J.J.C. von Grimmelshausen and was fascinated by his sensitive depiction of the Thirty Years' War. Rather than adopting the general's view, Grimmelshausen describes the war from the ordinary soldier's perspective, experiencing the conflict's brutality and absurdity at first hand. The well-known German dramatist Fritz Kater then used the novel to inspire a work exploring the state of constant physical insecurity, a feeling generated both by blindness and wartime. In his first explicitly choreographic work, Armin Petras interpreted the text for a narrator and three dancers - including one blind dancer.

"the various aspects and symptoms of the twin themes of blindness and war are explored on the basis of this text - across 11 scenes embracing a temporality from the ancient world to the present, with two principal protagonists, grimmelshausen's simplex simplicissimus and the blind dancer pernille sonne. There are subsidiary characters, for instance, immanuel kant and papua new guinea villagers." (Armin Petras)

A co-production by the House of World Cultures and the schauspielfrankfurt, with support from by the Schauspiel Leipzig, the Maxim Gorki Theatre and the São Paulo Goethe Institute.
The play can be seen beyond the duration of the festival until June 14 at Maxim Gorki Theater.

mach die augen zu and fliege oder krieg böse 5
Director: Armin Petras, Text: Fritz Kater
Choreography: Lara Kugelmann
Dance: Lara Kugelmann, Pernille Sonne, Cristina Moura
Acting: Milan Peschel, Andrej Kaminsky
Stage, video: Natascha von Steiger
Costumes: Patricia Talacko

Armin Petras was born in Germany's Sauerland in 1964 and, from 1970 on, grew up in the former East Berlin. From 1985-87 he studied directing at the "Ernst Busch". Drama School. In 1988, he moved to the then West Berlin, afterwards taking a position as assistant director at the Munich Kammerspiele. In 1990, he started an intense cooperation with his alter ego, the author Fritz Kater. From 1996, he became in-house director in Leipzig and Nordhausen, and from 1999-2002 theatre director in Kassel. Since 2002 he has been working freelance. Since the 2002/3 season, he has been in-house director at the schauspielfrankfurt. In 2003 and 2004, he was invited to take part in the key German-language theatre festival Berliner Theatertreffen. In 2003 he was voted Playwright of the Year.