LUNA LUNA

Life does not exactly become easier when your Shaitan is lurking in your wardrobe. Your Shaitan, who is always ready to attack you with advice and who keeps score of where and with whom you were too indulgent and too hopeful. And your mother also likes to enter with more advice – and of course, she never knocks. Her topics: well, they’re pretty much the same as the Shaitan’s.

This is how M. lives. But M. doesn’t only live with the Shaitan and her mother, but also with Alphaville, Bon Iver, Portishead and Shakespears Sister. M. lives with their songs, she lives, thinks and speaks within them.

And now and then, M. asks herself whether the Shaitan and her mother may not have a point. At least concerning the fact that it’s high time that M. go out into the world again. And so she sets out on a journey like the world has never seen before: to distant planets and back, all the way to a moon-saturated finale with Annie Lennox. A great journey towards herself, where M. leaves the past few months and her bygone relationship behind, where she comes across asteroids and a shooting star, Mr Koschny from ESA and an elderly gentleman with a goat. Her travelling companions: the Shaitan and her mother – and across all the ruptures and cracks, she is guided by the soundtrack of her life.

“LUNA LUNA” by Maren Kames was published as an artistic synthesis between the covers of a book in 2019. A long poem opening up an overflowing world: A piece of written art full of allusions and linguistic games, shooting through the galaxies of pop, concrete poetry and dada and preparing to land somewhere inside a worm-hole between the ages, between present, past and future. “LUNA LUNA” was nominated for the Fiction Award of the 2020 Leipzig Book Fair and will now see its theatrical premiere at Schauspiel Leipzig.

Based in Berlin, Maren Kames is an author and translator; her translations include the work of Sivan Ben Yishai. Maren Kames’ debut “Halb Taube Halb Pfau” was published in 2016; its radio play adaptation won the title of Radio Play of the Month of the Academy of Performing Arts. In 2020, Maren Kames received the Literature Prize Text & Language from the Association of Arts and Culture of the German Economy.

Enrico Lübbe, artistic director of Schauspiel Leipzig, will stage the world premiere production. Its musical director will be Daniel Barke, who is director of the Leipzig-based vocal group VOXID among others and who will translate the musical worlds of “LUNA LUNA” for the stage, together with a choir. Josa Marx, who won the 2020 Oper! Award for the best costumes of the year and who has been a frequent guest at this theatre since his work on “Das Tierreich” von Nolte Decar in 2013, will design the costumes. Dancer and choreographer Salome Schneebeli has created both her own projects and numerous choreographies for theatres and festivals in Europe and worldwide. Following “Lazarus”, “LUNA LUNA” is her next work at Schauspiel Leipzig. Katrin Nottrodt will create the set, her first production at this theatre. Her work has been seen at Schauspielhaus Zürich, Münchner Kammerspiele and the National Theatre in Oslo and she has regularly collaborated with directors including Sigrid Strøm Reibo and Nicolas Stemann.