The curtain at our window has burned up once again

One heart is aflame, a second afloat downriver. They can only meet on the ‘heart’s time’. The meeting of lifelong poets Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) and Paul Celan (1920–1970) in post-war Vienna comprised a collision between two opposite poles of trauma. Bachmann’s father was an officer in the Austrian army, while Celan’s parents died in a concentration camp – and he narrowly escaped mass transport himself. However, the two were as one in their relationship to language, their only real home – and simultaneously punishment and source of misunderstanding. It was through language that they were able to find, lose, hurt and heal each other. Marking the passage of time and the journey of life, the fragments of their letters, unsent concepts and verses, constitute a body of shared imagination, a dream of the other, of a creative and amorous harmony which is more often a figment of imagination than a reality. To what extent is it in fact possible to represent and depict our world through language itself?

Anna Davidová (1984), with her dreamy directorial poetics and vivacious imagery, has become one of the most notable directorial talents of the young generation. As freelance director and subsequently artistic director (2019–2021) whose contribution to Goose on a String Theatre cannot be overstated, she has created a number of productions in Brno, all of which have been enthusiastically received by the audience as well as by the professional public. She holds the Theatre Critics' Award for Talent of the Year.