This year the "Ensemble 9. November" celebrates its 30th anniversary with a theatre festival of the arts. At the end of their festival, it now comes once again to the revival of their first play "Scenes of a Cultured People", which was premiered on the occasion of the 50th commemoration of the Reichsprogrommnacht.
Main idea and continuous thread is the theme of culture and selection in Auschwitz (sweat stains and pimples forbidden). In unison, eight women in simple everyday clothes stomp onto a bare stage. The strict choreography allows none to step out of line. By deliberately refraining from depicting the camp inmates as individuals, the director and her ensemble succeed in making the dehumanization and loss of dignity, systematic, as cogs in a perfectly controlled machinery, clear. The play is structured like a composition for language and movement. The events in the camp are commented on, like an ancient choir, by eight actresses. The perpetrators, though invisible, are omnipresent. They are their constant companions. With every breath, every word, every gesture the women make, they are a part of them. Through the partial emotional distancing of perpetrators and victims, the emotionality and the degree of involvement can be controlled by the spectators themselves. We see two stages (4x5m) facing each other. The acting stage with the eight women and the musician's stage with an eleven-piece orchestra and a singer. It plays the music that the women, in order to survive, had to play in the concentration camp, Puccini, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Viennese waltzes, etc.
"Szenen eines Kulturvolkes is considered one of the best works of the E9N" finds not only the FAZ. The play experienced numerous performances in Frankfurt and in many cities of the Federal Republic, including three series (1998, 2008 and 2013) with us.
In 1989, the poet Erich Fried wrote about the dramatization of 'Girls' Orchestra in Auschwitz' "I consider the performance a cultural, cultural-historical and historical necessity."
Text source and more information about this event: http://www.gallustheater.de/2018/10/szenku4.php
