In the Dream House (Das Archiv der Träume)

Which stories end up in archives, which do we prefer to forget? How can we deal with the painful chapters of our own life story? With the episodes you'd prefer to leave deep at the bottom of the cardboard box, even though you wouldn't be the person you are today without them? Carmen Maria Machado has found an answer to this in her memoir "Das Archiv der Träume" ("In the Dream House"): she tells the story of the literature student Carmen, who wins back control over the interpretation of her relationship with the charismatic, unpredictable "woman in the dream house", a relationship marked by violence and manipulation. Machado jumps playfully between genres, keeps rebuilding the dream house of her memories over and over – as a romantic novel, confession, spy thriller and self-help book – only to tear it down again afterwards. She dispels the cliché that lesbian love stories are an idealised utopia: "I enter into the archive that domestic violence between partners of the same gender identity is possible and not unusual. I throw the stone of my story into an enormous chasm and investigate the extent of the emptiness based on the quiet thud."

Writer Leo Lorena Wyss (who has won awards such as the Nestroy Prize for Best Young Author) has dramatised Machado's book for the Berliner Ensemble. Jules Head from Bristol embarks on a search for a theatrical language for the psychological mechanisms of traumatic experiences with great enthusiasm for experimentation.