The Flaneurs / Athens

For our project DIE FLANEURE / Athens Oleg Zhukov, Annika Ley and Gregor Schwellenbach traveled to Athens for one week. Their experiences and encounters are the source material for the evening, in which the audience is allowed to become a flâneur themselves.

Authors, flaneurs Oleg Zhukov, Annika Ley and Gregor Schwellenbach
With David Fischer, Justine Hauer, Manuel Klein, Adreas Meidinger, Oleg Zhukov
Directed by Frank Heuel
Space and costumes Annika Ley
Sound Gregor Schwellenbach

Premiere September 15, 2017, theaterimballsaal

The flâneur is a collector. Everything is an object of contemplation for him: the winners, the losers, the beautiful and the ugly. (Gero von Randow)

A musician, a stage designer and an actor travel independently to a European metropolis, equipped with a notepad, a (cell phone) camera, a recording device. The city is foreign to all of them. Housed one after the other in the same domicile, they roam the streets, guided by coincidences and impulses, in the perceptual mode of the flâneur. They do this on behalf of the fringe ensemble and for the new series DIE FLANEURE, which is about a very special view of European metropolis. In contrast to the single-minded, hurried and busy traversing of cities, the flâneur moves rather aimlessly. He is rather a collector: what surrounds him he perceives in parallel and allows himself the freedom to link obviously unrelated things. Thus, he becomes a contemporary figure in our cross-linked world.

The fringe ensemble starts its “reading” of the cities with Athens, the birthplace of democracy. The geopolitical situation, the current social tensions, the architecture, the historical as well as today’s importance for Europe made this city almost inevitably the starting point of the series.

The flaneurs of the fringe ensemble – Annika Ley, Oleg Zhukov and Gregor Schwellenbach – “read” streets, faces, facades, found objects in Athens and brought along their very own impressions, associations, messages in a form of their own choosing: pictures, notes, sounds, conversations, sketches, reflections. They formed the source material for an evening of theater in which the audience itself becomes a flâneur.

Join us in Athens! Ελάτε μαζί μας στην Αθήνα!