Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm

Even the timeline of this Zoom performance is messed up: it might have already happened. For example, it may be that the classic places of assembly in bourgeois societies and democracies – theatres and city halls – proved to be dispensable after the Covid pandemic was over. They simply weren’t needed any more: the places are even falling apart and citizens have already had to launch campaigns to preserve them. In “Nach dem Ende der Versammlung”, andpartnersincrime harness the dystopian potential of the near future in an essayistic tour of the Frankfurt Römer, once the beacon of a now-failed representative democracy. Using photos of the building’s architecture, filled with symbols of governance, sweeping digressions through its actual or imagined history and interviews with eye-witnesses of the bygone age of representation, they generate a highly emotive, and often very funny intellectual journey to the heart of an endangered democracy. It also looks at the relationship between places for political and economic assembly in the business hub that is Frankfurt. And it doesn’t matter that “Nach dem Ende der Versammlung” now almost seems a historical document itself. As a classic lockdown performance, this work is also proof of theatre’s imaginative power at a time of its own greatest crisis. Of a theatre that tonight also ultimately takes a look at itself: what would have the theatre been like if – perhaps fortunately? – everything had not turned out differently after all?