For some time now, the impression has been created that theatre must return to its agitative forms. For Kathrin Röggla, “writing the water” was an ideal commission of the Theatre of the Anthropocene in the age of ecological polycrises. Her initial question was the one about ecological action: Why do we act or actually don’t, who acts. The location of Röggla’s enquiry was Saxony, and the main problem there is not only water. As simple as the matter seems, it is entangled in a mythological and political context that places the question of generations at the centre. Does water as a connecting medium have to be understood today in the ecological context more as one of social, political and biological separation?
Part of Episode XXIX: “The Right to Flow. Water as Source of Life, Conflict, and Legal Utopias”
With Edson Krenak Naknunuk, Erena Rangimarie Omaki Ransfield Rhöse, Kathrin Röggla, Elisabeth von Samsonow & Florian Malzacher
21. September 2024 – Tangente Festival St. Pölten / Austria
In the frame of the exhibition “The Way of the Water”
Biography
Kathrin Röggla is a writer living in Cologne, Germany, working as a prose and theatre author as well as developing radio plays. Her novel Laufendes Verfahren (S.Fischer) and the play Das Wasser (Reclam) were published in 2023. She has received numerous prizes for her literary work, most recently the Else Lasker Prize (2022), the Grand Salzburg Art Prize (2023) and the Heinrich Böll Prize (2023). She is a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, of which she was Vice President from 2015-2024, and the Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung. She teaches literary writing at the KHM in Cologne and is currently a member of the RBB broadcasting council.
Links
- Kathrin Röggla’s homepage
- Theatre of the Anthropocene
- Material on Kathrin Röggla’s “The Water” (in German language)
- Review of “The Water” (in German language)
- TU Umweltinitiative - Environmental Initiative by TU Dresden students
- Greenpeace – information on the 1,5 Grade goal (in German language)
- Homepage of the climate activists “Ende Gelände”
- Cradle to Cradle (NGO)
- Germanwatch – (independent development, environmental, and human rights organization)