KLEIST & KRISE
Tårnby Park Performance Festival 2023 (DK)
PASSAGE Festival 2024, Helsingør (DK)
“Boys* in Sync, however, had moved to the city's northwestern corner, where, with their usual sense for playful understatement, they managed to connect a tour of the public housing complex with the dramatic events in Heinrich von Kleist's novel “The Earthquake in Chile”.
We embraced the concept and were carried away by the strong sense of community that resonated through the stairwell.”
Anne Liisberg, iscene.dk
The performance group Boys* in Sync is researching the communal area of Tårnbyparken (2023) and Helsingør Northwest (2024), which were both established in the 1950s to provide green and affordable housing, inspired by the Athens Charter.
200 years earlier Heinrich von Kleist wrote “The Earthquake in Chile”, a short novel about a young couple whose love is socially forbidden. Only through the catastrophe of an earthquake are they able to escape execution and find shelter in a community of survivors outside the ruins of the destroyed city. Kleist’s novel can be read as a study of community and societal trauma - eventually law is reinstalled and the two lovers are killed by the newly established community that they had put their trust in.
In the 40 min performative walk through the suburban landscapes, Boys* in Sync explore their socio-political topography, stepping in and out of theatricality, using the architecture as well as Kleist’s novel to raise the questions: “What does it need to build a community? What do we learn from a crisis?”
„They put their trust in this new, alternative community that was established after the crisis, because they believed and hoped that this post-catastrophic community would be different.
But they were wrong.”
40 min performative walk
with and by Jakob Schnack Krog & Simon David Zeller
with support from Dansk Artist Forbund & Tårnby Park Performance Festival
Photo credit: Max Morris