under construction
Gesine Danckwart was born in Lübeck in 1969. She worked for theaters in Vienna, Mülheim and Berlin. She studied theatre studies and founded an off-theatre in Berlin-Moabit. Her plays are staged in many theaters in Germany and abroad and were adapted as radio dramas. Gesine Danckwart has been an author and stage director for several film and theatre projects. Her work often leaves the stages and takes place in living environments, in order to connect the productions with realities and real-life interactions. Her last work, named “Ping Tan Tales”, was a theater and publication project about China which was realized over several years and presented in Berlin, Hamburg, Peking and on the Expo in Shanghai in 2010.
Wunderland (Wonderland)
A commissional work for Frankfurter Positionen 2013 – an initiative of the BHF-BANK-Stiftung
Ideal for a cast of five actors/actresses. At least. Aged up to seventy.
They are all at home in Wonderland: the poor, the career people, the young, the mothers, the unemployed – Characters of the city made by Danckwart. Weightless, they emerge again from this literary tessellation of an urban mixture of existing next to, against and with each other. The subtle image of a cruel but at the same time promising urban reality.
„The wonderful lightness and humor which is at the same time full of elated melancholia is not only due to Gesine Danckwart’s ability to observe people but also due to her skill to refine language.“ wrote Die Rheinlandpfalz about the premiere of Cilli Drexel which was invited to the Autorentage at the Deutsche Theater Berlin in 2013.
Wonderland was written as a commissional work for the Frankfurter Positionen in 2013, under the headline: „At the border – about the future of modernity.“ They dealt with different forms of specifically modern shifts of borders in our western civilization whose dynamic is accelerated by a green house effect.
Täglich Brot (Daily Bread)
Gesine Danckwart’s text, which premiered in Jena as a co-production between the theatre house Jena, the TIF, the Sophiensaele Berlin and the Thalia Theater Hamburg, consists of monologues which sometimes dare to almost evolve into dialogues before they are abandoned at the crucial moment because the speaker is afraid of disappointment. Between the chairs, the cubicles in the middle of a sea of time which is running, there is much space for associations, as well as for an exhausted dynamic between a contemplative silence, a frenzy of activity and hysterical outbursts. In the alternation between frustration and small victories, dreariness finds its hiding place. It is lurking in the heads – the mind is blocked, is worn out by banalities.
It hasn’t been about the daily bread, in its actual sense, for quite a while anymore. Five lonely dayshift stories about the fight for self esteem and success, against the realization of the absurdity of the services done and existence itself.“ Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten.
Girlsnightout
They are young, they are cheeky, they speak up, they are in a spirit of optimism. And they talk: about men, about the best fuck – of course, it wouldn’t work without it – about what, might …. in the future, about the summer – the other day, in the swimming pool -, about the small things in life, the wild thoughts and the gut feeling – did anyone ever call you “my pedicel”? -, about clothes, shoes, personal style. They have dreams and wishes, sometimes even hopes. They are looking for tenderness and acknowledgement. They want to have fun. Preferably tonight. Very normal young women at a girlsnightout…
