EVERYONE'S JOY, No ONE'S SORROW

Participatory performance by Simone Gisela Weber. The performance invites the audience to rethink carnival. It explores how community is created through carnival traditions, dance, masks and conversations.

The city is transformed into a temporary, kilometer-long collective body. People connect with their environment: they transform themselves into animals, creatures and objects. Now it's time to join in or leave the city! Carnival - an exuberant celebration of community? A huge drinking binge? A reflection of society or just like every year?
In the performance "Everyone's Joy, No One's Sorrow", performers Simone Gisela Weber and Juli Frodermann join the audience in a search for forms and ideas of community that are practised in Central European carnival traditions. The interactive performance is an invitation to merge carnival with post-humanist ideas.
merge. In a choreography of dance show, culinary art, masquerade and conversation, we examine carnival as a space of possibility: What kind of community is created when we not only perform rituals, but also question and rethink them? Can we understand carnival as a practice of transformation that connects us with other beings, perspectives and realities?
A celebration of transformation! Or a culinary get-together.
Put on the mask. Be part of it. Let the game begin!

Everyone's Joy - No One's Sorrow is a work in progress of a longer research project on Central European carnival traditions that Simone Gisela Weber and Sophia Keßen have been conducting since 2024. As part of Common Struggles, we are realizing a first staging attempt.

Languages: German and English
Duration: approx. 90 minutes

The research was supported by the research grant of the Fonds Darstellende Künste. The realization of the work in progress was made possible by the support of the Jan van Eyck Academie.