1 9 Monologue

The Italian-German duo VestAndPage will perform at the Performance Festival with “1 9Monologue”. Here’s what they say about it: “The personal experience of being as a body home to pathogens flows into this autobiographical performance text while building a bridge between precise self-observation and a global, historical and literary outside. While many in Europe consider it long since eradicated, it still presents one of the deadliest pandemics worldwide. In the Romantic period, it was the epitome of muse and poetry and a popular motif in painting, literature and music. As the “firstborn of the mother of pestilence and disease,” it has accompanied the primate human through the eras since time immemorial. Today it is a curable disease, yet more than one million people worldwide fall victim to it every year. Its social perception has changed fundamentally throughout the epochs: from the glorified malaise of the romantic Bohemian poets through the painful proletarian death during the industrial revolution to the antisocial illness of the lepers during National Socialism. Today it is considered the disease of the marginalized, the dependent and the destitute, hardly noticed by the common public. The talk is about tuberculosis”.

A VestAndPage production 2021/22

Soundscape: “Zauberberg” by Kassel Jaeger / Stephan Mathieu / Akira Rabelais

Based on a research supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media and the German Tuberculosis Archive Heidelberg.