About the School
With more than 2,300 students in Graz and Oberschützen, the Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Graz is an internationally recognized educational institute. Located in the heart of Europe, the university combines Austrian traditions in music and performing arts with a contemporary social context. The university connects seemingly opposing opinions and perspectives, and thereby forms the basic principles of interaction which determine and define its entire profile. These includes university and society, teaching and research, practice and feedback, tradition, and modernity, local and international. The Performing Arts (Drama) study program lasts 8 semesters. It supports young actors in the development of their talent, individual physical skills, and spoken forms of expression. It helps them become independent and full-fledged artists.
100 songs
100 Songs offers a hundred fragments of stories that will not be told. An old man, looking out of his window, a train station, women, men, people, a rose seller from Bangladesh, four apocalyptic horsemen, and many other figures build an urban environment for spoken words, thoughts, and memories. ‘It is not easy to write a play about an attack’, as the author Roland Schimmelpfennig says. And it is not clear whether an attack really occurs in 100 Songs. The play repeats a sequence of 4 Minutes again and again and again… These repetitions flash back, showing what was said, seen, heard, and felt in the last moments before a cup of coffee smashed to the ground. The audience, just like the performers, are stuck in this metaphor of a sudden ending. And this anonymous togetherness opens up the space for a mythological-pop-everyday life memory. Roland Schimmelpfennig is one of the well-known German authors of contemporary theatre. He wrote 100 Songs on a commission from the Länsteater Örebro in Sweden. Schimmelpfennig’s plays are structured in a mixture of epic and dramatic strategies. So, he continues Bertolt Brecht’s ideas of ‘doing’ and ‘showing what is done’. The first sentence of the play opens up this specific field – in between drama, novel, and performance Art – by describing what is (not) happening: ‘A man does not know how to start’. The approach of the University of Arts in Graz and the Director Rudolf Frey is to expose the fragility and vulnerability of body, relations, and life itself.
Author: Roland Schimmelpfennig
Directing: Rudolf Frey
Dramaturgy: Daniel Rademacher
Scenography, costumes: Eunike Koscher
Light design: Gerold Schreilechner
Music: Sandy Lopičić
Production: Daria Urdl
Cast:
Adele Behrenbeck
Aron Eichhorn
Irem Gökçen
Jennifer Groß
Anke Hoffmann
Sophie-Charlotte Kaiser
Alicia Peckelsen
Max Rehberg
Magdalena Julia Simme
Edgar Sproß
