Don Quixote (UA) - as part of the KUBAA season opening

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

Michael is estranged from the present day - in his inner world he is Don Quixote of La Mancha. He takes his son Sanjo for Sancho Panza, the caregiver for Dona Belisa, Quixote's housekeeper. Without knowing 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 game, the boundary between reality and fiction blurs. In the often bleak everyday life of care, cheerful encounters full of situational comedy emerge - 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 loopstation make visible what happens in the protagonist's inner world. MIGUEL DE CERVANTES (1547-1616) created his character for world literature after an eventful life as a soldier, in captivity by pirates and as an intelligence agent for King Philip II - ultimately in prison in Seville. "One wants to encounter him throughout life," writes Orhan Pamuk about Don Quixote, whose struggle with the windmills remains to this day a central motif of art and philosophy.