Stuttgart-Premiere: Flying Steps "Flying Hänsel & Gretel - Hunger Nach Aufmerksamkeit"

In the organizer's words:

In 2023, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Flying Steps, Vartan Bassil and Christoph Hagel present their new coup: "Flying Hansel and Gretel" - the classic of Grimm's fairytale world, as surprisingly powerful, fast-paced and visually powerful as never before.

How do you make the world's most told fairy tale fly? Vartan Bassil has an answer that is as simple as it is striking: "The hunger of today's children is the hunger for attention. And the seduction of the gingerbread house that they can't resist is the power of social media."

The forest of the virtual world in which Hansel and Gretel get lost seems like a great promise: a fairytale world in which wishing seems to help. All of a sudden, all kinds of possible and impossible dreams and images open up to the children. The witch doesn't have to do much to gain more and more influence and lock them in her digital cage. In this fairytale universe, she is an influencer who wants a price for the dreams she sells the children: not just a thousand and one TikTok dance videos and a maximum number of followers on Instagram. "She feeds the children something they can't get enough of," says Vartan Bassil, "and eats them alive, skin and hair."

But the Flying Steps are not just taking off on a choreographic flight through the witches' portal into the media world of the present day. The counter-world of the classical, the timelessness of the fairy tale remains their starting point and counterpoint. "Most fairy tales begin with hunger and lead to a world of wonder and abundance," describes Christoph Hagel, who can draw on such a "world of abundance" thanks to his rich experience as an opera director, above all Engelbert Humperdinck's immortal opera "Hansel and Gretel". And so the fairy tale's fast-paced journey goes in both directions, into today and yesterday, into the medial and the original in the electrifying field of tension between rap and opera, between the very latest and the very first stories ever told. "After all," summarizes Christoph Hagel, "we are on stage: the oldest virtual space in the world."

The most important ingredient here is the very highest artistic quality. With their top international stars, the Flying Steps perform their "Hansel & Gretel" show at the most breathtaking level in terms of dance, supported by the best music from all over the world: Classical, hip-hop, pop and breakdance. Thanks to this inimitable synthesis invented by them, in which extremes meet, the old, "original German" fairy tale material becomes not only universal, but also a great, urgent story with its finger on the pulse and nerve of the times.

Price information:

VVK from 38,55 € incl. VAT and sales fees, plus shipping costs if applicable