Or Who Owns the World

Social memory, history, politics… Concepts that can give dance a critical dimension. Kiriakos Hadjioannou, a distinguished dancer from the Hellenic Dance Company and a collaborator much sought-after by artists from Greece and abroad, presents his personal answer to what theatre, performance and dance are for.

Or who owns the world, which premiered at Kaserne Basel, one of Switzerland’s most important free theatres, is a multidimensional production. Combining past with present, video with live performance, movement with the spoken word, dance with theatre and film, the work generates a powerful on-stage dialogue between actions and artistic means. Realism and fantasy are combined to produce a visual effect whose structure is reminiscent of the TV news, and which invites the gaze to follow its multilayered image.

The production is driven and informed by “Kuhle Wampe”, the German political film from 1932 which freely translates as “empty stomach” and which was released in English under the title “Kuhle Wampe or who owns the world”. The film, which was directed by Slatan Dudow, scripted by Bertolt Brecht and features music by Hanns Eisler, tackles the acute social problems facing Weimar Germany (unemployment, fierce political clashes) shortly before the Nazi take-over. The production restates the film’s exploration of the concepts of solidarity, collective organization, equality and social utopia, making them relevant to our own era, and seeks an answer to an important question: to what extent is our present-day political thought and action incorporated into current artistic practice?

Like a game with five rounds, the production is articulated around different thematic actions and corresponding somatic images of collective structures—each of which seeks its opposite through the repetition and reproduction of movement. In so doing, the production highlights cooperation and social equality, but also demonstrates that the conditions of our present are such that dreams of utopia are condemned to remain just that: dreams.