An event in the context of the Frankfurt Poetry Days 2017.
Jan Wagner's first radio play is a meandering stream of words and shows a whole new side of the multi-award-winning poet. It is the titular gold that has lain dormant since the dawn of things but has not slept, just waiting to be found on the banks of a river somewhere in the deserted expanses, lurking for the One who sees it flash, to whom it winks out of the water and who leans down to pick it up, owner of a secret that cannot remain one. And so the rumor races from village to town, across lands and seas, until the factories and the offices are silent, the ships rock empty in the bay, only the picks and shovels of hundreds of thousands of fortune-seekers can be heard - "each to himself alone, and the devil to us all".
"Gold" is a lyrical play of voices in which they all find speech and song, the drifters and the traders, the prospectors and the diggers, the barmaids, undertakers, lovers and missionaries, the drunkards and spendthrifts and gamblers, all those who, with nothing but a little hope in their pockets, left their old existence behind forever, sometimes winning, almost always losing. A revue to intoxicate, in which the lovers and also the long-forgotten dead, buried in the earth, are allowed to speak for the last time, just like the gold that remains while those who sought it have passed away; a poetic sequence of scenes, complemented and mirrored by an original score by composer Sven-Ingo Koch. Directed by Leonhard Koppelmann.
Jan Wagner lives as a writer and translator in Berlin. His poetry collection "Regentonnenvariationen" was the first poetry collection to win the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2015. Primarily active as a poet, he published "Der verschlossene Raum", his second volume of essays, in 2017. The music of composer Sven-Ingo Koch is regularly performed by major orchestras and ensembles, such as the Ensemble Modern. Leonhard Koppelmann is a radio play and theatre director. In 2016 he directed the radio play version of Frank Witzel's "The Invention of the Red Army Faction by a Manic-Depressive Teenager in the Summer of 1969".
Afterwards, Sabine Küchler, head of the radio play department at Deutschlandfunk, talks to Jan Wagner, Sven-Ingo Koch and Leonhard Koppelmann about the creation of the play and their joint work.
Run: 15. July 2017 on Deutschlandfunk
In cooperation with Gallus Theater, Deutschlandfunk and SWR
With: Sonja Beißwenger, Mechthild Grossmann, Heikko Deutschmann, Jan Maak, Henning Nöhren, Yohanna Schwertfeger, Kalle Kalima (electric guitar) and Dirk Rothbrust (percussion)
Director: Leonhard Koppelmann
Production: Dlf / SWR 2017
Text source and further information about this event: http://www.gallustheater.de/2017/06/goldrev.php
