Die Welt ist rund

In the organizer's words:

Translated by Michael Mundhenk, in the version by Kerstin Lehnart. In German and English, with corresponding playful translations.

Contradiction. Or: the seemingly contradictory. Or: Sentences that revolve around their own content until they break out in dizziness in unexpected directions: "That's what I thought when I knew it was true that a lion is not blue - that was clear. Of course I knew that a lion is not blue, but blue is my favorite color. My name is Rose and blue is my favorite color."
"The world is round" is a work full of contradictions; seemingly contradictory, dizzying things: On the very first page, the ten-year-old girl Rose wonders whether it would be Rose if it wasn't called Rose. After several small and larger adventures with Cousin Willie, with dogs, lions, water lilies and chairs on mountains, the girl carves her solution around a tree bark: Rose is a rose is a rose is a... There is no longer any contradiction, only repetition. And in this repetition, the transformation of the word into a world begins. Into a round world of words.

The author's life is also contradictory. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) grew up in Pennsylvania in a wealthy Jewish family. She encountered the male-dominated academic world in Baltimore and moved to Paris in 1903, where she lived as an art collector and writer with her partner Alice B. Toklas. Together they ran what was probably the most important intellectual salon of the time, which counted Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald among its visitors.
Stein's literary breakthrough came in 1933 with "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas", in which she wrote about her own life in the voice of her partner and was well received by critics and readers alike.
In 1939, her book "The World is Round" is published, from which the phrase "a rose is a rose is a rose" is often quoted, further increasing her fame. In the same year, she moved with Toklas to the French provinces, where she escaped the Second World War and deportation thanks to her good connections and collaboration with the fascist Vichy government.

To engage with Gertrude Stein and her children's book "The World is Round" is to engage with contradictions. The sequence of the imaginative images, the appearance and disappearance of the characters, the jumps between memories and the progression of the plot challenge logical thinking, while the language, which revolves around itself, has an almost hypnotic pull. In her stage version, Kerstin Lenhart succeeds in creating order in the circular chaos without losing the experimental language and the poetry of the images. The result is a play of contrasts and associations that resonates on several levels.

The production was conceived as a performance for all ages: as contradictory, combative and poetic as Stein's work, as tender as the search, sadness and delight of Rose, the rose is the rose is the rose, no matter where she is.

Age recommendation: for all ages