Renaud Herbin + Klaipėda Puppet Theatre (FR/LT)

The Lithuanian port city of Klaipėda has had a painful past, yet it has risen from the ashes time and time again. During the Second World War, it was initially annexed by the German Reich until most of the former inhabitants were evacuated in the autumn of 1944. When the Red Army reached the city, it found only a few people left. At the invitation of the Klaipėda Puppet Theatre, the French puppeteer, director and long-time artistic director of the tjp – Théâtre Jeunesse Public Strasbourg Renaud Herbin, who has often been a guest in Erlangen, conceived a play about this dark chapter in the city’s history. Together with his creative team, he explores – in his usual poetic manner – the question of what it means to lose one’s memory. How is history told when one doesn’t remember everything or doesn’t want to remember, and what happens to these gaps in one’s memory? Which narrator is more real, the actor or the puppet? The performance does not try to restore the truth – instead it uses fantasy, which is also a kind of memory, a collective memory. In this way, “Kissing the Ashes” is one of a thousand possible stories about what happens when a city loses its memory.