Gateshead International
Festival of Theatre
Sun 3 May | 9pm
Online performance | Age 18+
In Praise of Forgetting: Part 2
By Oliver Zahn
After WWII, when Germany lost the vast eastern european territories it had colonised over several hundred years, millions of German refugees had to be integrated into West, and East German society, a process that has largely been expelled from national memory.
Using a vast ethnographic sound archive that documents this cluster of historical events as a starting point, Oliver Zahn examines the promises and pitfalls of techniques and practices of social forgetting.
In Praise of Forgetting: Part 2 is the standalone sequel to a stage piece that premiered in December 2019. Continuing the line of inquiry started then, it completely shifts the action from a space of physical co-presence to the digital sphere, thereby raising new questions on memory and forgetting.
By and with: Oliver Zahn
Dramaturgy: Felizitas Stilleke
Supported by the Goethe-Institut London.
Ticket information and accessing events online
Due to Covid-19, this year's GIFT festival has been re-imagined online providing a digital space for us to come together and experience work and participate in virtual discussion events and workshop activities.
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Artist biographies
Oliver Zahn
Oliver is a German theatre maker, working in various capacities both on stage and behind the scenes. His performance essays circle around the ideas of nationalism, memory, history and corporeality. Based on extensive research made up of work in the field, in the archive and on stage, the resulting work is situated on the intersection of performance art and contemporary dance.
Past works include Situation with Outstretched Arm (on the history of the Nazi Salute), Situation with Doppelganger (with Julian Warner, on cultural appropriation and minstrelsy), and Second Essay on Gymnastics (with 7 collaborators on performing citizenship in the history of the German Gymnastics Movement). His last work In Praise of Forgetting (about the meeting of two archives on stage, one ethnographic sound archive and a grandson of displaced persons) premiered in December 2019.