Der Sandmann

In the organizer's words:

When his father dies in an explosion, little Nathanael immediately makes a connection in his mind to the sinister sandman that his mother often tells him about. He sprinkles sand in the eyes of children who don't fall asleep until they fall out bleeding. Traumatized, Nathanael also finds motifs from this story in his everyday life as a young adult, until one day he meets the beautiful Olimpia ...

Published in 1816, the psychologically finely drawn tale The Sandman shows E. T. A. Hoffmann at the height of his art: allowing the unreal and horrifying to break into a real scenario. The director Robert Wilson, celebrated worldwide for his original aesthetics, and the British singer-songwriter Anna Calvi brought The Sandman back to life in 2017. The Bielefeld production rethinks the strong impulses of the original as well as the theater production under the varying auspices of the interdisciplinary production.