Presse – Die Tagesschau (The Tagesschau news)
schließen“June 10, 2016 has made it to television, to the night magazine. On that evening, the Tagesschau news of the same day is retold as a daytime-show, which means with elements of dance, music, with DJs, it becomes a very opulent and almost baroque, an exuberant story. There's a dash of docu-fiction in there as well. The whole thing pretty much blew me away. It shows how creatively these directors have worked.”
(Peter Helling, NDR 90.3 Abendjournal, 13.6.2016)
“After an hour, thunderous applause. The real Tagesschau news can only dream of that.”
(ARD-Tagesschau Nachtmagazin vom 10.6.2016)
“A visually, acoustically and playfully elaborate production in which music stage and expert theater join forces to celebrate and deconstruct at the same time one of the great media myths of our time: the Tagesschau news.”
(Peter Michalzik, Theater heute, February 2016)
“It all looked incredible, sounded good, was intelligent and a celebration of glamour and plain living. What more could you ask for?“
(Peter Michalzik, Theater heute, February 2016)
“Of course, the show experiences its apotheosis at the end with the weather, here with a huge disco ball as the sun and equally exact and violent theater fog as mist. Before that, the current Tagesschau news was sung almost simultaneously, performed by two players who fascinated not only with their voices, but also with their unbelievably exact hairstyles.“
(Peter Michalzik, Theater heute, February 2016)
“A highly philosophical process that makes fun of the staging of media truth and the belief in it, that parodies the celebration of Germany's biggest television event, which, after all, repeats itself every day and always has exactly enough news for a quarter of an hour.”
(Egbert Tholl and Christiane Lutz, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 9.5.2017)
“Director Jan Philipp Stange from Frankfurt realized a project whose text material is provided by the current Tagesschau news. Schneider, a national champion in typing, puts the news, including sports and weather, on paper, and a pair of androgynous newscasters sing the news to live-produced and booming club sound. Another layer are television reports about the friendly Mr. Schneider. Thus layers of different realities and also different forms of perception are formed in a complex way. That's great thinking, decisively done.”
(Matthias Hejny, Münchener Abendzeitung vom 6.5.17)
“Stange is doing a daytime, up-to-the-minute show that looks like a no-wave video from the '80s, with two androgynous asswipes serving as hosts and a retired machine typing youth master.”
(Egbert Tholl und Christiane Lutz, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 9.5.2017)
“The performance is named after the date of each edition (for the premiere it was November 26, 2015). It begins, logically, at 8 p.m. and is then composed of several layers. The text, which from now on will be read out in the studio in Hamburg and at the same time broadcast all over the country, is sung with a time delay - by two distinctly androgynous singers, man and woman, and yet almost the same. They can only sing this text because a now-retired former Hessian youth champion in typing takes down the messages and the singers can read them with a time delay. The typist is joined by an employee of Hessischer Rundfunk (HR). He leads through the HR premises, explains the ARD and its network through which the Tagesschau is distributed. Everything takes place in a spacey cardboard stage, matching the techno singing of the two androgynes. What is it? Entertainment, yes, without a doubt. It's also intelligent, friendly, smiling, gently ironic. With this work, just as with his other works, Stange does not want to make a fundamental critique. He wants to exaggerate the Tagesschau, not affirm it. "The news is theater, and in that it is neither true nor false. It communitizes us, and in this it plays a role similar to that of ancient theater. Flanked by the stock market and the weather, our modern gods, it appears as a narrative of human striving and action." Thus, this performance is both the celebration and the deconstruction of an evening ritual and a media event.”
(Peter Michalzik, “In search of the text of our time.”, Radikal Jung Magazin 2017)
Die Tagesschau (The Tagesschau news), studioNAXOS, Frankfurt, 2015
schließen
It all looked incredible, sounded good, was intelligent and a celebration of glamour and plain living.
(Theater heute)
Werner Schneider was the 1967 Hessian youth champion in shorthand typing. He is a retired registrar with a weakness for Richard Wagner who lives in the peaceful hamlet of Alsbach-Hähnlein, a small village on the Hessian Bergstraße, where he is the head of the local typing association. And he can do something that nobody learns anymore: he can write down spoken words as they are being spoken. In this staging of the Tagesschau news bulletin, he once again writes for the audience against the clock: writing the production’s script by typing out the news live, which is displayed to the performers via a teleprompter.
The ‘Tages-Show’ also begins at 8pm, recording the news at the same time as the programme. The mixing of theatre, performance, dance, video and electronic music creates a hybrid form of musical theatre that is guided aesthetically by the question of the relationship between community and identity – because nearly the whole nation comes together for the Tagesschau ritual. Every day, the Tagesschau creates a community out of almost 10 million fans sitting in front of their television sets by informing them of faraway lands, but also giving them a feeling of home. It therefore assumes the ancient role of the theatre as a site of gathering. Flanked by the stock exchange and the weather – our modern gods – it appears as a narrative of human aspiration and action. The content of each performance is unique. It also shows film recordings that document the production of the Tagesschau, interlaced with images from Werner Schneider’s life in his Hessian idyll who – as it turns out – already crossed paths with public broadcasting media once before…
World premieres on November 26 and 28, 2015 at the Naxoshalle Frankfurt.
The production was invited to the Lichter Festival International on April 1st and 2nd, 2016 Art Award, on June 10, 2016 at the Körber Studio "Junge Regie" at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg (shortlist) and on May 2, 2017 at the festival "Radikal Jung" at the Volkstheater in Munich.
Director: Jan Philipp Stange, music: Charlotte Simon, Benjamin Bascom, Jonathan Penca, performance: Daniel Degeest, typewriting: Werner Schneider, dance: Gal Fefferman, Orla McCarthy, Narae Shin, Astrid Smits, dramaturgy: Heiko Stubenrauch, video: Jakob Engel, stage: Josephine Hans, Nils Wildegans, production management: Julia Straßer, photos by Irina Ximena Perez Berrio
With generous support from the HTA, studioNaxos and the City of Frankfurt Department for Culture.
