Memory Distortion. M I X T A P E | THEATER DER WELT

In the organizer's words:

A concert as an archive: voices, beats and loops make Moldau's fragmented history audible and visible.

In Memory Distortion. MIXTAPE, the story runs as a loop. Not always forwards. It jumps. It repeats itself. Hooks. It is something that is played, overplayed, deleted and re-recorded again and again. Just like memories, to which the title alludes with the psychological term memory distortion. Memory Distortion. MIXTAPE is a concert, an archive, an experimental set-up. The production produces music that is created in the moment like thoughts. Voices are sampled, looped, distorted, overwritten.
Director, author and performer Nicoleta Esinencu, winner of the ITI Prize of the Year 2026, comes from Moldova. The small country with a Romanian and Soviet past and an unclear future seems to be wedged between Western and Eastern Europe.
Her performance of beats, video, texts and acoustics draws on this context: from colonized country to socialist state to neoliberal democracy, it plunges from one political alliance to the next. These transitions leave traces, but rarely monuments. Many stories have never found their way into school textbooks. They exist as fragments, as private memories, as noises. Memory Distortion. MIXTAPE makes this state audible.
Political speeches are transformed into atmosphere, slogans into noise. Repetition becomes a gesture. Not as nostalgia, but as resistance to forgetting. Who decides what is archived? What is allowed to remain? What is overwritten? A work, confrontational, concentrated, interdisciplinary between concert, sound performance and theater

Venue: Spinnbau - Hall 5
Introduction: 30 minutes before the start of each performance
Duration: 1 h 40 min
Information: In Romanian and Russian with German and English surtitles

All further information at: https://www.theaterderwelt.de/programm/

A festival of the German Centre of the International Theatre Institute e.V.
Organized by Chemnitz Theatres, the Festival Academy Brussels and the European Capital of Culture Chemnitz 2025 GmbH.

Price information:

Tickets at: theaterderwelt.de/memory-distortion | 35% discount with festival pass. More information at: theaterderwelt.de/service/tickets