Drei Mal links ist rechts

“Drei Mal links ist rechts (Three lefts make one right)” is a performance about the challenges that come with radical opposites living together under one roof. A family portrait that explores the relationship between the populist Right and the liberal Left.

Julian Hetzel’s new work is inspired by the story of a cultural scientist who lives in Vienna and has a communist past, and his wife, a former student of his, who is one of the leading intellectuals of the New Right and the Identitarian movement. This odd couple has three children and negotiates seemingly irreconcilable positions, both at the kitchen table and in public.

For “Drei Mal links ist rechts”, actors Kristien de Proost and Josse de Pauw, who live together as a couple outside the theatre, enter into an artificial world that is loosely based on this incongruous couples of scholars. The project intends to extent this apparently impossible family construction to include a national, European and even global level. What does it mean to live and share a space with people who have a radically different belief system or a different order of values?

In times where right-wing populist have become members of European governments, Julian Hetzel decided to create a family portrait that serves as a magnifying glass for society as a whole. For this project, he wants to focus mainly on texts written by right-wing extremist authors. The controversial book “Mit Linken leben (Living with the Left)”, for example, is considered to be a collection of “survival strategies in a polarized society” from the point of view of the Right. In this text, the authors render a precise portrait of the progressive Left and try to provide an intellectual guideline for the Right. It is written as a manual, as a way of defending yourself from the so-called Left’s claim to moral superiority. Fifty years after the emergence of the alternative movement, the revolutionary attitude and energy have been seized by the Right while the political Left is blocked by an identity crisis of its own. With this performance, Julian Hetzel traces the ideological transformations that have led to this equation: Three lefts make a right.

Julian Hetzel is a performance maker, musician and visual artist. He develops works on the interface of theatre, music and media with a political dimension and a documentary approach. At Residenz, he recently co-produced the pieces “All Inclusive” (2018), “Mount Average” (2021 / 22) and, together with Ntando Cele, “SPAfrica” (2023).