Die Fährte

/ Stephanienufer / Intervention + Audio Play / german / 14+ yrs / 

You arrive at the reiver Rhine. Someone lends you headphones and an opera glasses. You lean against the railing and look at the other side of the river. And you're already part of the canon between the banks. Following in the footsteps of German Sheperds, Rheinmetall and Rheingold, the artists are looking for real companions. In a performative intervention on the banks of the river Rhine, we venture across the border between opera and everyday life, between composition and the sounds of nature, between backdrop and search image. The tracks of the German Sheperds lead us through the borders and conflicts of German history, through relationships and myths. While Sidney Corbett negotiates the profit-oriented industrialisation of suffering through arms exports with an electric guitar solo.

Concept + Performance: ASJA + Ricarda Walter. Composition + Electric Guitar: Sidney Corbett. Outside-Eye: Charlotte Arens. Many thanks to the interviewees.

The performance is supported by the Kulturamt Mannheim and is based on a residency supported by the NFT network with funding from the Fonds Darstellende Künste.

The intervention was made possible by the residencies of the Netzwerk Freier Theater (NFT), the Fonds Darstellende Künste and the City of Mannheim.

ASJA is a theatre maker and works on, off and behind the stage with playful formats that blur fiction and everyday life. She studied Arabic Studies in Marburg and Cairo and Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen. She has lived and worked in Frankfurt am Main as a performance artist, dramaturge and mediator since 2020.

Ricarda Walter is a freelance artist and performer from Mannheim and works at the interface of dance, theatre, video and installation. Her mostly site-specific works focus on the deconstruction and overwriting of social processes and collective action. She studied ethnology and philosophy in Heidelberg, specialising in visual and media anthropology. Since 2010, she has been working with various artists and organisations, primarily in the Mannheim and Heidelberg area.

Sidney Corbett was born in Chicago in 1960 and studied music and philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, at Yale University, where he received his doctorate in 1989, and at the Hamburg Musikhochschule with György Ligeti. Since 1985, Corbett has worked mainly in Europe. Since 2006, Corbett has been Professor of Composition at the State University of Music and Performing Arts in Mannheim. A particular focus of his work is in the field of music theatre.

Photos: ASJA + Ricarda Walter