ALKOHOL

ALKOHOL is a work about life with alcohol.
Nina Langensand and Fabienne Ehrler initiate an artistic search movement that is not an attempt to explain, not an accusation, not a drama. With personal memories, collected film material, experiences and conversations with and around the obsessive alcohol consumption of a close person, an evening about remembering and forgetting, about control and its loss, about secrets and disclosure emerges. A gentle examination of shame, vulnerability, demarcation, codependency and copresence and allows us to participate in a performative self-empowerment. What didn’t work in life, works on stage today. In an examination of the personal and private, they open up a view of power and relationship dynamics in the social treatment of alcoholism, to which all spectators can relate.

“ALKOHOL is a work about life with alcohol. If the radius could be widened, stones would fall from the heart. It is not about finding out why who starts drinking. Nor is it about an individual fate. Parts of the play deal with how society deals with the disease. In other parts we tell stories. Some of them we will have experienced, some of them others will have experienced. Memories, of something that was and is. We live with wishes. Things would be different from what they are and we despair when what we are afraid of comes to pass.The evening is an experimental field, a search movement where we don’t know exactly what which of us will find or realise. We can change. We have to be able to forget in order to survive, because otherwise the fear, the sadness, will eat us up. We have to remember in order not to repeat what hurts. To remember is to live together. We want to say yes to the great uncertainty we are feeling right now. We hope and rely on your witness, we look forward to your openness. We don’t know who among you is also living a life with alcohol and in what form.” – Nina Langensand & Fabienne Ehrler

by Nina Langensand

Cast