Ein Fan aus Thüringen

Actors

Sophie Hutter, Werner Eng

Concept, Staging, Text

Demjan Duran

Stage

Mila Mazić

Music

Misha Cvijović

Costume

Melina Poppe

Voice

Fabian Gerhardt

WP

8.12.2022

Ballhaus Ost, Berlin

Once upon a time, there was a fan from Thüringen. He was enchanted by a famous tennis player from West Germany. But one day, a nasty, moaning opponent from Yugoslavia appeared on the scene….

In April 1993, a fanatic Steffi Graf fan stabbed the then world’s best tennis player Monica Seles in the back on camera in Hamburg. “I just wanted to make her unable to play so that Steffi would be first again,” he says afterwards. His plan worked. Seles never finds her way back to her old strength, Graf becomes number one again and he is sentenced to two years probation. “A Fan from Thuringia” tells the story of the assassination and its protagonist(s) in the context of global political events in the early 1990s. Caught in fairy tale structures and the media red threads, Sophie Hutter and Werner Eng seek ways out of the narratives of good and evil, East and West, perpetrator and victim.

At the center of Demjan Duran’s directorial work is an examination of the country of his birth, Yugoslavia. By researching the past, he digs out themes into and for today, and places them in an overall social context. “Ein Fan aus Thüringen” is his first piece in Berlin.

A production by Demjan Duran in cooperation with Ballhaus Ost. Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media within the framework of NEUSTART KULTUR and the Richard Stury Foundation Munich.