The work and life of Rosa Luxemburg was the initial material of our research. Our purpose was to create a performance. The research began in Rome during an artistic residency. Gradually we focused on the material of the “Letters from prison” sent by Luxemburg to Sonia Lebneck. The letters touch us with their humanity and the sensitivity they exhibit to everything that lives (bird, insect, plant).
In Rome, we gave two cycles of laboratory seminars addressed to actors and artists. With some of the participants, we created the performance “Imagine a Heroic Landscape”. It was presented in Rome in 2018 and then in Athens in 2019. Finally, it took part in the Primavera dei teatri festival in Castrovillari, Italy.
In 2019, 100 years have passed since the assassination of the Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg from the right-wing Freikorps militias in Berlin in 1919. “Imagine a Heroic Landscape” is our own tribute to a lost revolution and a personality that still inspires and exemplifies. The title of the performance comes from a phrase that we have isolated from one of these letters.
What is Utopia? What is heroism? How do we fancy a landscape? What is worth, for us, fighting for?
In German romanticism, people were searching for the awe of the Sublime in the great natural phenomena (for example, in a storm, in a snow-capped mountain peak). Rosa Luxemburg seems to find heroism in the battle of an upside-down beetle with the ants or in a bird’s lyrical outburst! How can we deal with the small, seemingly insignificant in heroic terms?
Let’s create an ephemeral monument, a tribute to Rosa, by using precarious objects and materials just like our bodies and voices!
http://www.novamelancholia.gr/en/productions/46
In Athens, the performance was presented at THE EIGHT, a critical institute for arts and politics, an autonomous self-organised space.
https://8athens.wordpress.com/about/
This project has received funding by the Greek Ministry of Culture.