Because We Can

In Romania, most theatres design their projects by defining proximate areas or vulnerable social territories. The degree of inclusion in the theatre of certain disabled communities of representation is extremely low.
Is theatre not a platform of socialising with other media  and communities that it should actively involve?

SeTA Guten Tag! Ein Zirkeltraining Foto Bozica Babic

At the Kammerspiele Düsseldorf, one of theatres with a vocation for experiment and open to to interference areas (contemporary dance, social research, music), I saw on 8 January the performance Guten Tag!, created by the Visually Impaired Association of the Elderly Theatre SETA. SETA was set up in January 1989 and presented a performance at the Kammerspiele every year.

Guten Tag! is a map of intimate and public survival, an orientation guide in our own existence and the existence of others, a path between spaces, worlds, states and dream. A reflection made with plenty of irony and playful spirit on a vulnerable condition. In fact, Guten Tag! discusses through this condition contemporary society and its defining behaviours. The way in which visually impaired are regarded and integrated. The way we build our prejudices and ask ourselves questions about them.

Guten Tag! is an anatomy of personal and collective perception. How does a visually impaired person perceive colours? How does a visually impaired person perceive his belly? How is perceived the noise of his guide cane? The great quality of the performance Guten Tag! lies in the tone of discourse: detached and, at the same time, careful at the nuances of each actor's involvement, without any pathetic note and full of humour. You leave Guten Tag! without saying: “Poor people!”. On the contrary. You’ll say: ''They can do so much!”.

Guten Tag! is the performance of the desires coming true in a fiction that empowers the ones they represent.

SeTA Guten Tag! Ein Zirkeltraining Foto Bozica Babic

Coffee on the right bottom shelf, filters to its left, cups all the way down. Switch to the right, key hangs above, second key with strawberries to the ring, handle to the left.
These are some localisation indications in the text, designed as mini-monologues with predominant personal stories, shells open to fluid subjectivity.

Stories flow one into the other, are matched in association of events occurring at different ages, with subtle focus on some incidents that marked the ones who tells them.
Most intimate details are superimposed over cold ''information'' on going through some space.

Theatre of subjective memory, Guten Tag! is an accumulation of actual hows – how visually impaired count money, how they place food on the plate, how they distinguish between the different colours of the clothes on hangers, etc - which become existential hows, multiplication of “differents”: a different way of doing the groceries, a different way of learning, a different way of being.

Performers say their real names and account quietly series of events that changed the route of their existence: departure from the GDR, the experience in prison, working as a masseuse, working in theatre, etc.
A lady seated on a stool types a text on a typewriter, designed especially for braille users.

It is the text of her own life experiences, concentrated in a few minutes, while her eyelids flutter intermittently and hands rhythmically touch the keyboard. The sounds they make and the way her voice sounds are theatrical signs that function perfectly into the economy of the monologue.

Guten Tag! is the performance of redefining a limit conditions from the perspective of power it gives you