eigentlich müssten wir tanzen

Returning from a week-end trip to a mountain cabin, a group of five life-long friends finds itself confronted with a post-apocalyptic landscape. All other people have either died or disappeared; the obviously man-made catastrophe cannot be traced back to its beginnings. What begins as a search for clues ends up as an aimless wandering through Alpine landscapes, with no goal except sheer survival in the face of an impervious nature.

Heinz Helle attempts a radical sketch of a human existence after all certainties that constitute our world and our identities have been dissolved. His experiment of the end of days, not at all far-fetched in the face of current global crises, ruthlessly reveals the fragility of any man-made order. For Schauspiel Leipzig, Heinz Helle will dramatise his own novel – creating his first ever theatre text. His novel already was already prefixed by a theatre quotation: “I stood at the shore and talked with the surf blah blah, the ruins of Europe at my back.” (Heiner Müller)

Heinz Helle studied philosophy in Munich and New York and worked as a copywriter for ad agencies before he went on to study Literary Writing at the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel. He lives in Zurich with his family. His debut novel “Der beruhigende Klang von explodierendem Kerosin” was on the shortlist for the 2014 Swiss Book Award and “eigentlich müssten wir tanzen” was nominated for the 2015 German Book Award.

Director Daniel Foerster has been creating his own projects as author and director with Junge Akteure at Theater Bremen, at Deutsches Theater Göttingen and TiK Berlin. He studied directing at the Academy for Performing Arts Baden-Württemberg. His production “Borkman”, based on Henrik Ibsen, was invited to the Körber Studio Junge Regie in May 2014. For his play “Tanzen! Tanzen!”, Daniel Foerster received the Young Artists‘ Award at the 2014 Heidelberger Stückemarkt. At Theater Osnabrück’s festival Spieltriebe, he directed Sascha Hargesheimer’s play “Archiv der Erschöpfung”. Between 2015 and 2017, Daniel Foerster was a member of the Regiestudio (Directors’ studio) at Schauspiel Frankfurt; one of his productions there, “Fräulein Julie”, was invited to the 2016 festival radikal jung in Munich.