"Meteorites" Revisited: A Discussion with Playwright Sasha Marianna Salzmann

Speakers): Sasha Marianna Salzmann

About the play:
Germany is in the World Cup final and Berlin is dreaming again in a summer fairy tale, in order to, for a short time, forget the world torn by wars. But not everyone can, or wants to, get carried away. Udi, Roy,Serösha, Üzüm and Cato do not fit, regardless of how hard they try. They are queer, they just arrived but still they are running away from each other and from everybody around them. But they have the same wishes everyone has: they strive for the feeling of of arriving and being in good hands: a love, a house, a child. A short hot summer of upheaval not everyone will survive. Inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, Sasha Marianna Salzmann sends her protagonists into a marathon – in search of a new self which denies conservative concepts of identity.
Sasha Marianna Salzmann is the author in-residence at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin. She is the co-founder of the cultural and social journal freitext. From 2012 to 2015, she was the artistic director of Studio Я, where among other things she initiated Rauş–Neue Deutsche Stücke [New German Plays]. Her theater plays have been performed internationally and have won a number of awards. Together with Maxi Obexer, she founded the New Institute for Dramatic Writing in 2015 and directs the literature workshop Flight, that conditions me. In 2016 she was one of the initiators of Disintegration, A Congress of Contemporary Jewish Positions. She also works as an essayist and curator, and will complete her first novel in 2016.
“With her shrewd perspective on a brutal present and her biographical perspectives on the past, Sasha Marianna Salzmann is perhaps the German-language playwright of the hour.” - Detlev Baur, Die Deutsche Bühne
 
Co-sponsored by the Department of German Studies and the Department of Theatre & Performance Studies
 
Photo: Copyright Esra Rotthoff