Bernadette La Hengst

Together with her 16-year-old daughter and the audience, the theatre songwriter Bernadette La Hengst embarks on a musical journey through time to the stations of her mother’s life between Silesia, the GDR, Lebanon and the FRG. For this project, La Hengst draws on her research and discussions of recent years, in which she went in search of her mother’s traces. As a child, she was a refugee twice, from Silesia via the GDR to NRW. In the 1960s, she lived for a time in Lebanon and Syria. MUTTER**LAND builds a bridge to the current way of dealing with flight and displacement: staged dialogues and vocal duets between stage and film, between mother and daughter, rituals performed with the audience – and La Hengst’s songs shift from the microcosm to the macrocosm of a society in which migration is a cultural foundation.