DIE KUNST DER WUNDE (UA)

What exactly has been thrown out of kilter? Why are people on the tram giving me strange looks on my way to work? What happened since the world became a global village and I’ve been feeling more and more like I can’t keep up, like I could lose my job, my friends and my social reputation? A diffuse, elusive grey haze of fear and paranoia is generated by a debate between different voices: Should I take my self-optimisation and exhaustion on a shopping spree or should I rather google the nearest medical emergency location? “I am an act of violence the way I am crossing the street, EVERYBODY can see that.”

Highlights on frontlines of debate and the fears of a society: Queer-feminist voices are confronted with those of white men, the old with the young, female journalists in search of victims with a team of doctors who want to take care of a sick “state-baby”. They all want to be heard, seen, loved and understood; everyone tries to be on the right side. Many Is wander through this repeatedly refracted shape of society like ghosts, looking for their meaning, their realities, their homes, their frontlines, struggling to be allowed to actually take place. Finally, they ask who among them even made the rules. Who leads the discourse? Which norms shape us in our daily togetherness, who has the right to interpret these norms? Who makes them and when do they become a problem?

Swiss author Katja Brunner has written her new play “DIE KUNST DER WUNDE” for Schauspiel Leipzig. Her writing explores socio-political topics in an unconventionally funny and condensed language. Her textual anamnesis feels out the sore spots and representations of a diverse society; it digs deep with urgent questions, taking the medical history of a state that has been thrown out of kilter and asks for our care. A social kaleidoscope opens up. Meanings shift and throw a light on occasionally painful questions and facets of our present times, which are in urgent need of examination. Katja Brunner parades a confusion of voices that tear open human abysses, and yet she manages to spot both the comical and the absurd in all of this.

Katja Brunner was born in Zurich in 1991. Her studies include Creative Writing for the Stage at the Berlin University of the Arts. She received the Mülheim Dramatists’ Award in 2013 and was voted Best Emerging Author of the same year in the critics’ survey of Theater heute. Her plays deal with topics on the margins of human coexistence, whether it is old age, child abuse or the myth of Switzerland. In 2017, her play “geister sind auch nur menschen” celebrated its German premiere at Schauspiel Leipzig’s Diskothek.