For 44 years, the mining company Wismut extracted uranium from the Ore Mountains of Saxony for use in the Soviet atomic project. Today, the mines are closed, but the history radiates through the landscape and bodies. In this docu-dance, the movement choir invites the audience into the hollowed-out landscapes to see what new forms of collective, ideology, landscape and life can exist here.

“The mountain breathes. Cold air tumbles into the winding mineshafts. Below, the air flows in and out. Its mainlines, cross-cuts and blind shafts work together like an organism. It breathes, as if iron lungs were built there, ventilating the entire mountain range. Above ground, the slag heaps, the headframes-nature hewn with an axe. Whole forests are sent down, whole mountains come up.”
(Werner Bräunig, Rummelplatz)

“Wismut – a landscape, perforated, grooved and studded. Over-sized scarring appearing as hills, mountains, millions of years old. Radioactive landscape – radioactive gaze. Under the skin, ossified traces of history, wars, steam engines, the rising and falling of global market prizes, political deadlocks, scientific availability and processing, running fantasies of omnipotence formed out of coagulated fear into the earth as mushroom clouds. A dream of never-ending conquest, radiating for hundreds of years, perpetuum mobile of victory, a weapon that, long after the wars on the surfaces have ended, eats away at the nuclei, decaying into smaller and smaller weapons. Where a paranoid Central Committee once locked its jaw into the earth, it can’t be broken open, even though its body already died off. And now, a strange nostalgia is creeping over us, for today’s bite marks need to be traced to someone.”
(Luise Meier, Wismut fragment)

[Source: play bill]

TFB Nr. 1380