The night was kind to us

Name: The night was kind to us
Start: 2026-06-12T19:00+0200
End: 2026-06-12T20:15+0200
Location: Ost-Passage Theater

In the organizer's words:

A forgotten cellar. Dust in the light. Empty archive boxes. What remains when history has been erased? The theater performance transforms the stage and auditorium into a seemingly abandoned museum: white plinths, scattered papers, covered in dust. The audience enters, invited to look - but the exhibition is one thing above all - empty. And then objects step into the spotlight, objects that tell stories between Nepal and Germany.
Carried by trans performers, they become testimonies to a history that has never completely disappeared. With a minimal stage set and little spoken language, a multi-layered evening of movement, gazes and bodies unfolds. Dance, drag and performance interweave fragments of memory, violence and self-empowerment. Between emptiness and excessive demands, between pain and glitter, images emerge that irritate, touch and challenge.
How do we reach for a history that is not preserved in archive boxes? And what do we carry within us, from our history, in our movements and voices? The performance invites us to be touched - by what is missing and what remains.
Directed by: Alma Roggenbuck, Asshika Magar, Maksim Fabri & Shuby Bhattarai

Background: What remains of a story that was never archived? "The night was kind to us" understands performance as a living archive and brings trans and non-binary perspectives between Nepal and Germany to the stage. The starting point is the emptiness of institutional archives: many trans stories have been suppressed, falsified or never collected - and yet they continue to exist in bodies, memories and objects. At the heart of the project is a collaborative rehearsal process at the WUK Theater in Halle. Together with 6-8 local trans and non-binary performers, the archive performance collective bridging into our vaults (biov) will develop a site-specific adaptation of their work. Biographies, everyday objects and research into trans history become the starting point for a polyphonic artistic exploration. "The night was kind to us" is biov 's second production and follows on conceptually from the performance "It wasn't just Stonewall", which was created in Kathmandu in 2025. A central element of the work is the handling of objects. Collected and borrowed objects from trans communities in Nepal and Germany are at the center of the production. They do not function as illustrative props, but as independent carriers of memory. Through the performers, these objects begin to "speak" and open up access to stories that cannot be found in traditional archives. The performance combines theater, dance, drag and documentary elements. Language only appears in fragments: in Nepali, English and German, interview quotes are juxtaposed with movement, facial expressions and objects, opening up a space for interpretation that allows us to reflect on the place of marginalized history. What does it do to a community not to be allowed to have a history and to appear in public discourse merely as a symbol of the new, the too new? In the echo of this "loud silence", a multi-layered production unfolds as an artistic counter-project: how can we tell our stories in a self-determined way and lie where we want?

The German-Nepalese exchange project is supported by Fonds Soziokultur e.V. and the International Co-Production Fund of the Goethe-Institut Munich. The premiere will take place on June 4 at the WuK Theater in Halle (Saale). After the performances in Leipzig, the play will then travel to Nepal to be performed there as well.

This content has been machine translated.