EXTINCTION

In the organizer's words:

In EXTINCTION by Julien Gosselin, the seething artistic and intellectual furor in Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century forms the starting point for literally realizing the "cheerful apocalypse," as the author Hermann Broch called the period of European recklessness before the war. Julien Gosselin now imagines the apocalypse as the radical annihilation of Western art and civilization. Based on Arthur Schnitzler's plays and novellas, as well as Thomas Bernhard's last novel Auslöschung, EXTINCTION confronts the nobility of the Viennese elite, their striving for beauty and ideal, with the sheer brutality of drive and death. In a mix of concert, live video and radical spoken theater, Julien Gosselin's new literary piece sifts through nihilism and destruction, searching in it for traces of a buried revolt and the possibility of reinventing the project of modernity.

Acclaimed French director Julien Gosselin is known for visually stunning adaptations and stagings of great novels by authors such as Roberto Bolaño, Michel Houellebecq and Don deLillo.

EXTINCTION is his second production at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, this time in a transnational coexistence with his collective theater group Si vous pouviez lécher mon cœur, which he founded in 2009 with artistic companions, including actors.

After STURM UND DRANG, Gosselin's first production in Germany, which premiered at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz on June 3, 2022, EXTINCTION, based on text material by Thomas Bernhard, Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is the second part of his appropriation of German literature and history.

Rehearsals took place in Berlin Rummelsburg and in Calais, France. EXTINCTION will premiere in Montpellier on June 02, 2023, will stop at the Festival d'Avignon as well as at the Wiener Festwochen and will then open the new season of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in September 2023.

In French and German with German surtitles This content has been machine translated.