Beatriz 1968

In this musical lecture performance, a collective of minstrels roams through the archives of the Paris May, the Prague Spring and the opposition movements in the GDR. Inspired by Irmtraud Morgner's opulent montage novel, they follow the historical traces of revolutionary hope and experience the imagination seizing power.

The medieval trobadora Beatriz de Dia awakens after an 800-year sleep while the unrest of the student movement rages in Paris in spring 1968. Hoping for social progress and the emancipation of the sexes, she sets out in search of the dragon Tarasque and the beautiful Melusine. Her journey through the south of France, however, leads her into precarious conditions: As a paperless person on a construction site, she is forced to do illegal work and prostitution, ends up in a psychiatric hospital and finally in a bourgeois marriage with a greengrocer. While she gets caught up in the contradictions of reality, she misses Paris May in a bitter irony of fate. And yet the stubborn Trobadora persists in the possibility of another life — an act of defiant affirmation of life.

How could street poetry be told in the GDR? And above all: How can you still sing about it today? In the hunt for fantastic visions of the future and with the desire to reinvent life, the Trobadoras climb onto the barricades of destroyed vegetable shops, where they sing out old and new songs of political resistance. BEATRIZ 1968 is a novel adaptation, immersive historical spectacle, question time, concert and cast at the same time.

The music theatre collective Hauen und Stechen develops its work in cellars and on opera stages and has been working on a radically accessible musical theatre since 2012. In its work, it combines prominent and hidden music of various styles with influences from acting, opera, film, philosophy, visual arts and performance.