Don Quijote (UA)

DON QUIJOTE (UA)
A play with music and shadows 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 and costume 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 feels like a stranger in the present, but in his inner world he is Don Quijote de la Mancha. He sees his son Sanjo as Sancho Panza, and the carer appears to him as Dona Belisa, Quijote's housekeeper. Without knowing it, he is spending the last days of his life in a care home for people with dementia.

When Sanjo and the carer begin to play along with Michael's world, reality and fiction become inseparable. In the sober, often bleak routine of care work, warm encounters emerge - full of situational comedy - alongside poetic images of windmills, heroic battles and nocturnal visions.

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

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES (1547-1616) created in Don Quijote a figure of world literature whose battle with the windmills became - and remained - a central motif of art and philosophy. "One wants to encounter him again and again throughout life," writes Orhan Pamuk about the character Cervantes conceived after an eventful life as a soldier, captivity under pirates and service as an intelligence agent for King Philip II - ultimately in a prison in Seville.