2015
A musical theater inspired by Max Frisch’s “Drafts for a Third diary” and interpreted by the six men of the “ensemble für neue musik zürich” on the occasion of their 30th anniversary.
The small village of Berzona in Ticino was Max Frisch’s retreat between his travels. The film “Gespräche im Alter” was shot there in 1985. Astride Schlaefli uses excerpts from “Gespräche im Alter” as well as “Drafts for a Third Diary”, which Max Frisch wrote in New York in 1982/83, for her production. Both pieces raise questions about ageing and death, and thematize a love relationship between an older man and a very young woman. Frisch shares openly about his experiences of aging, the awareness of death, the creeping loss of memory and the ever-widening “circle of friends among the dead”.
The imaginative and poetic staging plays with Frisch’s texts and transfers them into a bizarre and original scenic world. In a colourful Duplo railway landscape, Frisch and the ageing members of the ensemble immerse and lose themselves in a common game. It’s a return to childhood.
PERFORMANCE Ensemble für Neue Musik Zürich (Hanspeter Frehner, Nicola Romano, Lorenz Haas, Urs Bumbacher, Viktor Müller, Manfred Spitaler
CONCEPT, DIRECTION, SOUND Astride Schlaefli
COMPOSITION Christoph Coburger
TECHNIQUE, SOUND Christian Kuntner
DRAMATURGY Fabienne Naegeli
LIGHT Michael Omlin
PHOTOGRAPHY Fabrice Nobs
“I sometimes wonder why it is so difficult to talk about age.”
(„Ich frage mich manchmal, warum es so schwer ist, über das Alter zu reden.“) M. Frisch
Astride Schlaefli
+41 (0)79 628 33 48
astride@astrideschlaefli.ch