Currently no performances
He wants to go to Paris. Or somewhere else. Get out of this shitty provincial town either way. Away from poverty and his parents' violence. Because he wants to live a different life to the one expected of him. And he manages to do it. He makes it all the way to the high society of the capital city. And is forced to realise: his new life has its own violence. Heiki Riipinen directs Édouard Louis' autofictional novel about betraying the place you come from, class and the price of climbing the social ladder.
A coproduction with the Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg.
A young man grows up in a working-class family in a provincial area. He lacks money and prospects – anyone who wants to be different to what people expect becomes the target of enmity. He realises quickly: because he wants to leave, because he loves men. He learns not to stick out, to speak more quietly, to hide his desire. So his classmates, his family and especially his father don't notice anything. He studies like crazy, changes his gestures and preferences – all to escape the violence of where he comes from. And he manages to do it. Until he gets to an elite university in Paris. There, he discovers words he would never have used at home – and is forced to see that there is also violence in them. That he now lives among people who look on where he comes from with contempt, who describe his father as lazy, his family as lowlifes. And therein lies the crack: the new place opens up another life for him – and reminds him that he must deny his old life if he wants to live the new one. Sometimes he thinks: betrayal; mostly: survival. And so he swaps one form of violence for another.
Édouard Louis' autofictional novel "Anleitung ein anderer zu werden" ("Change: A Method") unflinchingly describes the struggle for self-determination, and the rage and shame we can feel about the place we come from. Finnish-Norwegian director Heiki Riipinen – like Louis, once a queer boy growing up in the provinces – with his team and choreographer Adam Linder, embark on a performative exploration of what it costs to be different.
- Heiki Riipinen Regie/Kostüme
- Johannes Nölting Dramaturgie