In the organizer's words:

About resistance, bureaucracy and exile.

Antrag auf Aufenthalt is an act of protest against tightened migration policies, the rise of the far right, cultural cutbacks and a suffocating bureaucracy that particularly affects independent and migrant artists. A newly arrived woman and a man threatened with deportation stand in a sterile room facing a verdict on their right to stay. Marked by incurable conditions, the virus of hopelessness and the virus of exile, they remain eternal applicants in a world that rejects them. Once artists, they now belong to the "applauding syndicate", reduced to spectators of a system that no longer recognizes them as creators. They have to justify their existence with absurd forms, Kafkaesque interrogations and black humor.

Against the backdrop of a shift to the right, racism and massive cutbacks in the independent performing arts scene, the production exposes a structure that places people under general suspicion and makes artistic existence increasingly precarious.

Inspired by Kafka's literature, a space is created between power and powerlessness, in which reality and absurdity merge. Surreal images, endless corridors, doors to nowhere, self-filling forms, draw a poetic architecture of exclusion and pose the question: Can existence itself be subject to approval?

Supported by the NRW Landesbüro freie Darstellende Künste and the Kulturbüro Dortmund

Price information:

Normal price 24€, reduced price 12 €