Sorry

Monster Truck & The Footprints

A well-fed white man sits on a spotlessly clean square stage and eats a bar of Ritter Sport while looking at the motionless body of a black child lying almost naked at his feet. A provocation – clearly hard to take: too strident, too banal, too brutal, too true. But what exactly is repelling us? Who makes the rules? What is useful and what is harmful? How freely can we really relate to this? And what colonialist gesture is contained even in feelings of guilt and empathy?
In ‘Sorry’ members of the audience become witnesses, (un)willing accomplices. The desire to react, to position oneself, can find no obvious outlet. Together with the Nigerian choreographer Segun Adefila and his young dance company The Footprints, the Berlin-based theater company Monster Truck attacks any notion of an encounter between equals when overshadowed by asymmetrical power relations and destabilizes the moral ground beneath the audience.
‘Sorry’ is a passionate horror film that presents post-colonial cultural exchange as a nightmarish game full of borders – and in which it remains unclear who is the winner in this roulette of dependence. How mutual is dependence? Who is the victim? Who is the vampire?
Monster Truck’s refusal to shy away from risky subjects and repeated fundamental questioning of the role of the audience are both things they have long since proven – at the Impulse Festival and elsewhere. When in ‘Sorry’ contemporary Nigerian dance meets the conceptual theater of the Giessen school, this is far more than a simple provocation. It is a genuine attempt to meet on equal terms without denying the impossibility of such an enterprise. And it is an invitation to accept this contradiction, while at the same time vehemently opposing it.

Artist Talk following the performance on 28 June

ON

WEDNESDAY 28 JUNE 7:30 PM Cologne
Language yoruba / engl. (dt. supertitles / engl. surtitles) Schauspiel Köln / Depot 2
Tickets here
THURSDAY 29 JUNE 7:30 PM Cologne
Language yoruba / engl. (dt. supertitles / engl. surtitles) Schauspiel Köln / Depot 2
Tickets here

Duration 90’

Concept Monster Truck, Segun Adefila
Performance The Footprints, Andreas Klinger
Artistic Collaboration Oluwaseun Awobajo
Dramaturgy Marcel Bugiel
Technical Director, Lighting Stine Hertel
Sound Alice Ferl
Artist Support Abiodun Sinat Adefila, Daniela Schroll
Production Management ehrliche arbeit – freies Kulturbüro

A Production of Monster Truck and The Footprints in coproduction with Goethe-Institut Nigeria, FFT Düsseldorf, Sophiensæle Berlin and Theater Rampe Stuttgart. Funded by the Fonds TURN of The German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Berlin Senate administration for culture and Europe. This performance is facilitated by the NATIONALE PERFORMANCE NETZ within the framework of the Guest Performance Fund for Theatre which is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media and the Departments of Culture and Arts of the German federal state.

Foto © Florian Krauss

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