Volksrepublik Volkswagen

China Pictures Import

By Kaegi

The People's Car and the People's Republic. Two global players meet. As one of the earliest western Brands VW started to produce in China in 1985. Meanwhile the german car company sells 3 million cars every year in China. 4 out of 10 VW-cars globally. But how much mobility needs the future superpower whose megalopolis are struggling with smog and traffic jams.

For more than 30 years car engineers from Hannover and Niedersachsen have been travelling to the country that seems to be developing and changing at the speed of light. Their letters and e-mails to their relatives and collegues in Hannover and Wolfsburg reflect their encounter with a world between plan and surprise.

Stefan Kaegi travelled past these mobile diaries of a capitalist partnership: to one of the biggest car factories in the world, to the financial district of Beijing, to the workers compounds in the subburbs of Shanghai and into the mountains of Sichuan where still posters with Mao's face decorate the walls of wooden Houses.

On stage the letters of the engineers turn into camera-travellings through growing urban landscapes, into Karaoke songs for workers and Kung Fu exercises for Expats. Private traces through a country that produces jalousy and fear in the west. The country of copy-culture is copied onto a theatre stage. The car turns into the narrator of a road movie that transports stories on a human scale from continent to continent.

With: Susana Ginebra, Mathias Max Hermann, Janko Kahle, Tomek Kolczynski, Hagen Oechel, Julia Schmalbrock, Fang Yun Lo
Konzept, Text + Regie: Stefan Kaegi
Choreography: Miki Shoji
Consulting: Constanza Macras
Stage: Evi Bauer
Dramaturgy: Aljoscha Begrich
Music: Tomek Kolczynski
Video: Hanna Linn Wiegel
Interpretation: Kefei Cao

World Premiere: 10.10 14 Schauspiel Hannover