(…) the carnival played out on stage by the dancers in such a way that the walls shake, is like successive iterations of ‘frostbite’ that we remember well. (…) From the jungle of emotions, the fawning change of costumes, the trance music played live and even the smells emanating from the stage, a poignant silence is left in one’s mind at the end after the screams that ring out in the finale. / Marta Kaźmierska, „Gazeta Wyborcza – Poznań”

The coronavirus plague forces us to confront death. It imposes a physical distance, referred to as “social distance”. The trauma of isolation stimulates reflections on the transience of human life, triggering the need to redefine such concepts as contact and closeness. This begs the question: how were pandemics dealt with in the past? The Renaissance was an era in which physicality and the individuality of the human body were reborn: love, sex, the body, death, freedom, Eros and Thanatos… how did Shakespeare measure up to the experience of death caused by past plagues?

Drawing on these inspirations, the playwright Rolf Baumgart and the choreographer Yoshiko Waki, want to create an image of the City. Will the eponymous Traumstadt turn out to be a “city of dreams” or a “city of traumas”?

Creators want to see what will happen when dance, understood as creative movement and the most corporeal of arts, collides with reality. And to create a space for reflection about the effects of the pandemic by rediscovering the love story of Romeo and Juliet as told in William Shakespeare’s immortal drama.

Performance selected for the Golden Yorick Competition finals.