Don Quixote (UA) - World Premiere with Subsequent Premiere Celebration

DON QUIXOTE (UA)
Play with music and shadow theatre after Miguel de Cervantes

With Arwid Klaws, Bernd Tauber, Hugo Ziegler and a child
Shadow theatre Robert Buschbacher, Anne Brüssau
Music Aitor Reynders
Adaptation and direction Jan Jedenak
Composition Marijn Simons
Co-direction and dramaturgy Tonio Kleinknecht
Set design Stephanie Krey, Jan Jedenak
Construction and development of shadow figures Robert Buschbacher
Dramaturgy Tina Brüggemann

Who hasn't dreamed of saving the world? Michael is estranged from the present, but in his inner world he is Don Quixote of La Mancha. He takes his son Sanjo for Sancho Panza, and his caregiver appears to him as Doña Belisa, Quixote's housekeeper. Unaware of it, he spends the last days of his life in a facility for people with dementia.

When Sanjo and the caregiver begin to play along with Michael's fantasy, reality and fiction become indistinguishable. In the sober, often bleak everyday world of care, cheerful encounters emerge, full of situational comedy and poetic images of windmills, heroic battles and nocturnal visions.

The production weaves motifs from Cervantes' novel with biographical fragments from the old man's life. Shadow play, puppets and live music with electric guitar and loop station make visible what happens in the protagonist's inner world.

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES (1547-1616) created in Don Quixote a figure of world literature whose struggle with windmills in the 19th century became a central motif of art and philosophy - and has remained so. "One wants to encounter him throughout one's life," writes Orhan Pamuk about the character whom Cervantes, after an eventful life as a soldier, in captivity to pirates and as an intelligence agent for King Philip II, ultimately conceived in prison in Seville.