regie

director

director

LENZ

- freely adapted from Georg Büchner

Staatstheater Darmstadt I Premiere September 2025 (season opening)

"Don't you hear anything? Don't you hear the terrible voice that screams around the entire horizon and is usually called silence?"

Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz and his steadily deteriorating mental state are the subject of this posthumously published story by Georg Büchner. On his hikes through mountain landscapes, in conversations about art and God, reality and delusion increasingly blur. Nightmares plague the poet, and he is repeatedly overcome by anxiety. Constantly searching for something to cling to, searching for meaning in a world that is becoming increasingly alien to him, brief moments of hope and happiness also arise in memories of his childhood and in encounters with nature.

In "Lenz," director and performer Rebekka Bangerter finds a description of a contemporary social state of mind in which everyone, like Lenz himself, is searching for meaning in a noisy world where everything is both true and false. With performative and installation elements, this production of Georg Büchner's classic novel doesn't offer answers, but rather sets out to reclaim complexities—without allowing themselves to be discouraged by them.

With

Aleksandra Kienitz, Stefan Schuster

Director

Rebekka Bangerter

Stage, costume & lighting design

Lukas Fries

Music/Sound Design:

Moa Holgersson

dramaturgy

Carlotta Huys

director

director

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HORROR VACUI

- a live typed performance in collaboration with an AI

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DAS Theatre, Amsterdam I Theater Monty, Antwerp

2023

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The curtain opens. A cursor is blinking on an empty screen. Only the clicking of the keyboard is breaking the silence as we embark on a sensual walk through the forest.

Rebekka is writing a performance, exploring the power of language and the politicallity of authorship and creativity. But while she is still typing and thinking, text generating AI’s have found their way into our everyday use, creating much more text than her - in much less time. Producing text has become posthuman.

What does it mean to create in a time of constant technological updates? Can we still allow ourselves to get lost? To read between the lines and slow down?

Inspired by techno-feminist perspectives and writing strategies, horror vacui invites you on a humorous, poetic and critical journey on the entanglement of human, text, machine - from female typewriters to disembodied AI’s. What reality do we write with the tools we create? Who is writing? - And who keeps doing the work in the background?

An evening between edited and deleted thoughts, dominating datasets, collective imagination and our own bodily presence.

Premiere October 2023, Theater Monty Antwerp

Research Phase: DAS Theatre, 2022 / 2023

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Concept / Text / Performance: Rebekka Bangerter

Dramaturgy: Henriette Festerling

Scenography and light design: Hendrik Walther

Mentoring: Joachim Robbrecht

Eye Exterior: Emke Idema

Costume Advice: Daphne De Winkel

Consulting Isadora: Chun Shing Au / Jimmy Grima

Technical Support: Durante Van Kuijk

With special thanks to Edit Kaldor