A river piece
The common thread of this German author: being on the side of the oppressed, writing to give them a voice in a documentary spirit. Published in three volumes from 1976 to 1982, “The Aesthetics of Resistance”, by Weiss, exposes the defeats of the working world, and of anti-fascism in the 1930s, following the initiatory journey of a young man who travels from Berlin to Stockholm via Spain.
This piece goes beyond the lives of the characters – fictional or not – whose wanderings we follow. We discover the movements of the narrator’s parents chased away by Nazi persecution; the suicide of writer Karin Boye; the fights of anti-fascists underground in Nazi Germany and the annihilation of the Red Orchestra. In short, nearly 900 pages which form a sort of political and aesthetic assessment of the proletarian movement, its dreams and its failures. Which results in a long play (4 hours 15 minutes) performed here by a very young generation of actors from the school of the National Theater of Strasbourg.
A documentary, epic, agit-prop, commedia dell’arte and narrative theater, which this 2024-2025 TNBA season loves.
