Susanne Reng does not shy away from discussion!
- Written by Portal Editor
A few days after the Fazil Say "Gezi-Concert" at the Volkstheater in Vienna, we arrived at the Grenzenlos Festival in Augsburg, where a message from Ms. Susanne Baertele from the Volkstheater awaited us.
Through email contact, she brought us together with Ms. Susanne Reng, who had studied acting in Hamburg, then moved to Augsburg in 2003, with stops in Aalen. Her life was and is solely devoted to acting.
Susanne Reng worked as an actress at the Theater der Stadt Aalen, then she returned to Augsburg to deal with her main topics: old age and youth, seniors and dementia, etc. First work as a director followed. She loves to create scenes from autobiographical stories that can be linked to her main themes. In the meantime she has taken over the artistic direction of the theater "Junges Theater". And their issues can become more of a focus.
This also applies to her project "Last Home" as a play
The background of this project is the realization that in Augsburg alone about 40% of the population consists of immigrants, refugees, displaced persons and other migrants who have found a new home here. All of these people come from a wide variety of ethnic groups, so that the customs, rites and habits can hardly be more different. An important question in this context has always occupied her: Is there a "last home" in Augsburg? Can people be buried here as their culture, religion or belief requires? And how is the city itself dealing with this challenge?
The project and its employees are investigating these questions and understandably many other shortcomings that have hardly been noted up to now. With the means of biographical theater, interviews, written or oral stories, biographies and fates are condensed into an authentic play in which the experts of everyday life act, tell, sing and document their own stories. The central question always remains the same: Do we have a common home in life and in death?
Last home - goals of the project
"A people is judged by how it buries its dead", a traditional saying of the philosopher Pericles from the year 430 BC.
The play "Last Homeland" thrives on the stories of people from different cultures and generations. The objectives are primarily the following:
- Make the skills and knowledge of different cultures tangible.
- Increase empathy for the "diversity in Augsburg" among the citizens.
- Promote the concept of "home" in a multicultural urban society.
- Showing the history of a cemetery and the process of opening it to all denominations.
- Represent all ethnicities, religions, cultures, genders and generations as equals.
Between July 19 and August 8, the play will be performed ten times in the Göginger Friedhof. The rehearsals are already taking place there. The play uses the area of the rows of graves as a drama station and ends in the dark with an intercultural funeral feast.
As early as July 30, 2014, an interreligious round of talks took place at the Göginger Friedhof as part of the Augsburg Peace Festival.
We will continue to report on this project.
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