THORSTEN LENSING Tanzende Idioten

In "Dancing Idiots", Ursina Lardi, Karin Neuhäuser, Sebastian Blomberg, André Jung and drummer Willi Keller play survivors on their way to the next catastrophe. What sets them apart is a ludicrous mixture of brutality and tenderness, anarchy and metaphysical instincts, pain and lust for life.

Goldie does what she loves best: she rebuilds her house. Her joy is as infectious as it is disturbing, because Goldie is seriously ill. She wants to do the best she can with a body that is giving up on her. She knows she is dying, but doesn't like to admit it and plans for a future she no longer has. Her cat Apollo enjoys her increasing weakness: at last he can lie on top of her undisturbed and snore endlessly. Goldie tells him everything that humans are not allowed to say. Terrible stuff!

Suddenly the doorbell rings and Goldie's father, newly in love, is at the door with his lover. The two of them are on their way to the seaside in their camper van and pay Goldie a spontaneous surprise visit. Completely unexpectedly, the father, almost bursting with happiness, finds himself at his daughter's deathbed. He believes he is at the beginning, she knows she is at the end.

The whole world floods into Goldie's room once again, everything that is difficult to say goodbye to: forests, animals, the sea. The second part of the evening tells the story of Goldie's death. The habitat of earth is abandoned and her room is transformed into outer space in a matter of seconds.

The starting point for the entire project was two sentences from a story by Denis Johnson. In it, he describes a man who is dying and drawing reconstruction plans. His cat lies on top of him and sleeps. Starting from this basic situation, Thorsten Lensing wrote the text for "Dancing Idiots", in which he also repeatedly takes up phrases, fragments and dialogs from other Johnson works. Johnson said of himself and his work: "I would describe my characters in exactly the same way as myself: We are dancing idiots." Denis Johnson is one of the most important contemporary American writers and is highly revered by colleagues such as Jonathan Franzen, Philip Roth and David Foster Wallace for his "goosebump-inducing", "unpretentiously direct" and "brutally funny" prose.

Director Thorsten Lensing has been staging independent productions since the mid-1990s, mostly in co-productions with theaters and festivals such as the Berliner Festspiele, the Sophiemsale Berlin, the Volksbühne Berlin, the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus Kampnagel Hamburg, the Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt, the Grand Théâtre de la Ville de Luxembourg, the Münchner Kammerspiele, the Theater im Pumpenhaus in Münster, the Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen, the Schauspiel Stuttgart, the Züricher Schauspielhaus and deSingel in Antwerp. He always works with a permanent cast of outstanding actors. After adapting Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky's novel "The Brothers Karamazov" (Friedrich Luft Prize 2014) and David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" (invited to the 2019 Theatertreffen), the presentation of Thorsten Lensing's first self-written play "Verrückt nach Trost" (world premiere at the Salzburg Festival in 2022) as part of the Performing Arts Season 2024/25 marked the start of a long-term collaboration with the Berliner Festspiele. The production can be seen at Kampnagel in May.