Aus der Fremde / Ellis Island

Josefstädter Strasse 26

1080 Wien

 

“Language is what excites humankind,” is how the Austrian author Ernst Jandl describes the relevance of poetry. Jandl, born in Vienna in 1925, remains one of the most important representatives of experimental poetry. He virtuously juggles words between wit and existential seriousness, creating new and surprising linguistic worlds. Spoken, his texts sound polyphonic and rhythmic, like word music. His highly personal play “Aus der Fremde” (From Abroad), written in 1979, is also a spoken-word opera in its theatrical form, dealing with a writer's suffering from art, love, aging, and loneliness. At the same time, it is a grand narrative about the loss of home and identity, about being a stranger within oneself and in the world.

The renowned Swiss opera and theater director Jossi Wieler combines Ernst Jandl's play with a text by the French author Georges Perec, born in 1936, who also became famous for his whimsical linguistic experiments. In his poetic essay "Ellis Island" from 1978, the legendary transit point of immigrants to America becomes the symbolic setting for Perec's stories. He reconstructs lost biographies of immigrants and pieces them together like a jigsaw puzzle. Georges Perec creates a cartography of memory, identity, and destiny.

Director Jossi Wieler, the "textual sleuth with a keen sense" (Andreas Klaeui), will create a musical-theatrical score from these stories of home and foreignness, of the loss of identity and place.

(Source: josefstadt.org)