Fremd

In the organizer's words:

by Michel Friedman

Director: Emel Aydoğdu

Set design: Eva Lochner | Dramaturgy: Sarah Tzscheppan

To the connected series: DESTINY - A UTOPIA?

approx. 90 minutes no intermission stroboscopic effects

"I was born in a cemetery. Pain that knows no beginning, that knows no end. [...] My mother, my father, my grandmother: over-living. Mourners. Sad. Sad for life. I was their smile. Smiling sadness. "

FREMD tells the story of a child. He was born in France, the son of Shoah survivors. The family is stateless, homeless. A life in the diaspora. In the 1960s, the family immigrates to Germany. To the country of the murderers, of all places, who wiped out almost the entire family of the parents. The child feels alienated. "I live somewhere in the middle of nowhere." How are you supposed to build a life in this place? What do you dream of here and how do you look to the future in a place where the past lies like a veil over everything and the present means exclusion, racism and anti-Semitism? The family sticks together. Perhaps sometimes it even holds on too tightly. The child feels responsible for its parents for the rest of its life and remains a child, even when it has long since grown up. The trauma weighs heavily on the family and won't let go. "If I'm afraid of the stranger, how much the stranger is afraid of me. And the fear, the fear is my companion." But the child survives and tries to keep dreaming.

Michel Friedman has written a lyrical, autobiographical text about the feeling of being a stranger. FREMD is the story of one person and also describes many other fates in exemplary fashion. This prose poem reads like a poetic warning in the face of the political and social events of recent months. A plea for a complex, critical view of the present and the culture of remembrance, the recognition of differences and attitudes and, above all, a plea for humanity. "Where is the other side of the stranger?"

Emel Aydoğdu, who successfully premiered the novel WIR WISSEN, WIR KÖNNTEN, UND FALLEN SYNCHRON on the Werkstattbühne in the 2023|24 season, will stage FREMD as her second work at Theater Bonn. With a polyphonic chorus, from which individual voices emerge time and again, the director wants to build a bridge between the individual-personal story and the collective-universal experiences of exclusion.

Emel Aydoğdu, born 1990 in Gaziantep, Turkey, is a director and author. She studied Scenic Research, Religious Studies, Art History and Modern and Contemporary Art in Bochum. She was an assistant director at Theater Oberhausen from 2017 to 2019 and has worked at Schauspielhaus Bochum, Junges Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, Theater Osnabrück, Theater Oberhausen, Junges Staatstheater Braunschweig and Theater Konstanz, among others. From the 2024|25 season, she will be the artistic director of JUST - Junges Staatstheater Wiesbaden together with Anne Tysiak.

The premiere took place as part of the Days of Exile.