Schweigt Stille / Sober Up!
Musical Theatre Music & Sound Theatre & Performance
When Europe ’sobered up’ in the 18th century, by changing its drinking habits from alcohol to coffee, the age of enlightenment also began. Bach’s so-called “Coffee Cantata”, premiered at a Leipzig coffee house, narrates young Lieschen’s story of coffee addiction in a rather amusing way, as the expression of an emerging bourgeois culture. In Schweigt Stille / Sober Up!, Argentinian composer and theatre maker Santiago Blaum juxtaposes this canonical work of European highbrow art with the concrete political and economic conditions of coffee production. He disrupts the harmonies of the European classics with Latin American rhythms, thus diverting the focus from a “music for the mind” towards its physicalness, onto the material quality of coffee and the human energy invested in it.
cast
Staging, Music, and Concept: Santiago Blaum, Fernanda Farah, Zaki Hagins, Eva Löbau. Cello: Eurico Ferreira Mathias. Stage: Jan Brokof. Lighting Design and Video: Catalina Fernández. Costumes: Arturo Lugo. Dramaturgy: Tamara Saphir. Dramaturgical Counsel: José Fernando Peixoto de Azevedo. Outside Eye: Tatiana Saphir. Video Assistance: Benjamin Krieg. Assistance: Sigourney Pilz. Production: Jill Emerson, Till Rothmund.
credits
Schweigt Stille / Sober up! receives funding from the Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media, as part of the Alliance of International Production Houses.
A Santiago Blaum production in co-production with Radialsystem Berlin, Residenz Schauspiel Leipzig and FFT Düsseldorf, with support from Förderband Kulturinitiative Berlin. Supported with funds from the Capital Cultural Fund (HKF).
