WANDERVOGEL

A discussion with Mark Cornwall, author of The Devil's Wall, will take place after the performance on November 30.

“My coffin should be borne by six of our best and most handsome youths. Leave me alone with them for an hour, or a night, before I must go. If still among them, then I know I am alive even if my body is dead.” 

It's 1918. The Sudeten Germans find themselves in a situation they don't want to be in. The land they consider home is now called Czechoslovakia. Heinz Rutha, a charismatic man with a romantic streak, has a plan. Through the education of an elite group of young boys, he will form a Männerbund that will become the ruling class of a future emancipated Sudeten German state based on Spannist principles.  In 1937, Czech authorities misinterpreted Rutha’s mission as sexual deviance and charged him with corrupting adolescents.

Rutha´s  life is the starting point for the theater composition Wandervogel,which attemps to look at the genesis of ideas that later materialized into a social catastrophe.  Parallel to the historical theme, which is inspired by Mark Cornwall's book The Devil's Wall, director Jan Mocek and a collective of performers work with their own intimate experiences to find contemporary meanings of the concepts on which Rutha built his ideas of an ideal community. What does sexuality, the body, the state, fascism, nature, beauty mean today?

Concept, scenography, directing: Jan Mocek
Created with, performed by: Tomáš Janypka, Philipp Schenker, Matěj Šumbera, Arseniy Mikhaylov, Václav Němec
Music: Matouš Hekela
Lighting, sound: Ondřej Růžička
Production: Táňa Švehlová, SixHouses z.s.
Artistic advice: Sodja Lotker
Choreography advice: Jaro Viňarský
Photos: Adéla Vosičková
Special thanks: Mark Cornwall, Jan Hofman, Lucia Škandíková