provenance

Imagine fitting your past in a suitcase. Or on a piece of paper. Or to a night at the theatre. Imagine having to tell me where you came from, who you are — and you knew that there are many versions of the truth. In his award-winning novel “Origin,” Saša Stanišić writes against too easy truths and against forgetting — with wit, anger, warmth and an eye for the absurdities of remembering. Between Višegrad, Heidelberg and the maze of one's own biography, the result is a polyphonic game about identity, escape, family — and the power of storytelling as well as the urge to invent yourself again and again.

Stanišić himself, born in 1978 in what was then Yugoslavia and came to Germany in 1992 as a teenager, makes his own story the starting point for a literary exploration: What remains of a person when he loses his homeland? What is the origin of what we call the future? And is it possible to find home precisely where stories are shared and memories find a common language?

Ukrainian director Stas Zhyrkov, who has lived in German exile since the Russian invasion, builds on this. He too has the experience of sudden departure, of uprooting, in his work. Together with his team and ensemble, he stages “Origin” not as a mere adaptation, but as a dialogue between different biographies that brings questions of identity and home into the present day.

Please note: Strobe effects are used in this production.