Wiener Festwochen 2011: Bodenprobe Kasachstan - Soil Sample Kazakhstan

Wiener Festwochen 2011

Bodenprobe Kasachstan - Soil Sample Kazakhstan
A scenic journey / Astana-Berlin / Österreich-Premiere

Date: Jun 15 to 18, 20.30;
Discussion with the audience following the performance on Jun 15
Venue: Halle G
in Russian and German

When Stalin deported hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans living in Russia to Kazakhstan and Siberia during the Second World War, petroleum had already become the worldwide No. 1 energy carrier. When Helmut Kohl brought one million Russian-Germans back to Germany from Kazakhstan in the early 1990s, one of the biggest oilfields of the past 20 years was discovered in Western Kazakhstan. How are the repatriates faring in Germany? The old-timers mostly live on welfare, while the younger ones are often rashly dismissed as neo-Nazis. In the next decade, though, Kazakhstan is planning to produce more petroleum than Kuwait before the war in Iraq, and the country\'s economy is growing by over six percent annually. A petrodollar élite has sprung up in the capital Astana. The government operates state-funded programmes to lure émigrés to return.

Since March 2010, Stefan Kaegi has been holding casting calls for first-person narrators of this petroleum saga. He is looking for German-Russians who are willing to return to Kazakhstan on the pipeline trail and interested in looking at the country they grew up in with a refugee\'s detachment and a returnee\'s close attention. The result is a staged simulation of Kazakhstan where people sing Russian and German songs describing the steppe routes and the vagaries of life, petroleum and power.

Cast
Concept and Direction: Stefan Kaegi (Rimini Protokoll)


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