The play "Heritage. Rooms without people"

The XII International Festival-School of Contemporary Art TERRITORIA and the Center for Contemporary Art "Winery" present the play "Heritage. Rooms without people ”- a joint work of the Vidi-Lausanne Theater (Switzerland) and the Rimini Protocol company (Germany). The authors of the play - Stefan Kagi and Dominic Huber - offer the viewer to go through eight rooms and listen to eight stories of people who had prepared in advance for their own death, eight messages to us, living. The performance will take place in partnership with the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art in the Bely Shop with the support of the Swiss Hellenic Culture Council in Moscow.

Truckers and janitors, prostitutes and builders, high technology and low thoughts - perhaps there is no such topic in the world that Stefan Kagi and the Rimini Protocol company dare to take up. This time they turned to the theme of death, staging a performance in Lausanne on preparations for leaving the other world.

What will remain of me when my physical body disappears? How did I live my life? What will happen to loved ones after my death? Will they remember me? How many years will this memory live?

We are used to thinking that no matter how much you prepare for death, you will still not be able to meet it fully armed. But the authors of the stage installation “Heritage. Rooms without people ”decided to help the living understand what it feels like to die. For two years, the production team traveled around Switzerland (a country with amazing life expectancy and a lot of legalized ways to leave it), talking with doctors and employees of the funeral home, lawyers and neurologists, employees of nursing homes and priests. The results of this communication can now be seen in eight rooms dedicated to eight stories of the relationship with death. A lonely pensioner and a desperate jumper, an ex-ambassador to Africa and a comic book artist, a bourgeois married couple and a serious scientist - none of them enter the stage, but they all tell their stories through videos, photos, personal items, etc.

A common joke about the fact that the "Rimini Protocol" is called a theater only because it is not music, painting or cinema, the joke is only partly. The theater company, created in 2002 by three graduates of the Institute of Applied Theater Studies, has gained fame as the main innovator of European theater over the 15 years of its existence. Rimini works in all conceivable formats and genres, but whatever they put on a “walk-in”, a flash mob or a documentary performance - Kagi, Wetzel and Haug are always very serious about the matter and conduct mandatory “field” research. In Moscow, the Rimini Protocol company is known, first of all, as the authors of best-selling performances - Remote Moscow and Cargo Moscow.

Stefan Kagi:

"Performance" Legacy. Rooms without people ”is an attempt to describe not death, but the path to it that each of us will have to go through sooner or later. Is it possible to portray the absence of something? How to tell that soon there will be nothing to say, because the story will end? ”

Olga Gerdt in the newspaper Vedomosti:

“What is happening behind every closed door, of course, is better not to tell. And not because it will be “not interesting” - it is “not interesting” by definition: you will not laugh and you don’t have to wait for melodramas either. Statement, protocol, volumetric installation of personal human files. It’s impossible to tell because all this must be experienced personally. ”

The performance is in English and French with Russian subtitles.

The premiere took place on September 14, 2016 at the Vidi-Lausanne Theater, Switzerland.

Duration - 1 hour 50 minutes. Without intermission.

Age limit 18+

Location: CSI "Winery"
Art. metro Kurskaya / Chkalovskaya
4th Syromyatnichesky per., 1/8
White Workshop (entrance 14)