Goldstück (WP)

Location

A woman tries to break out of the cycle of domestic violence and financial dependency. Every day she is confronted with bureaucratic hurdles and a lack of help. Her growing child turns to right-wing ideologies and becomes radicalised online. Despite all resistance, the woman tries to fight her way out of isolation, constantly accompanied by an inactive choir, which alternately emanates exhaustion, indifference or contempt and is difficult to counter in its inert mass ... The new production by the theatre collective Pièrre.Vers, led by director Christof Seeger-Zurmühlen and author Verena Güntner, celebrates its world premiere in Chemnitz as part of the European Capital of Culture 2025 programme and can be seen immediately afterwards at the asphalt Festival. "Goldstück" focuses on the threatening development that right-wing actors and parties are trying to roll back democratic and liberal achievements, utilising anti-feminist and anti-gender narratives.

How to counter this? Telling one's own story seems to be a way out: feminist US author Rebecca Solnit believes that those who make it visible cannot disappear. In her essay "Recollections of my Non-Existence", published in 2020, she writes that this is "rebellion. A resurgence, a seizure of power". "Goldstück" outlines a way to expand the chorus of humanity again ..

Following its successful four-part cycle "Historification" and its examination of Nazi crimes in Düsseldorf, the Pièrre.Vers theatre collective's latest productions deal artistically with events of right-wing violence and threats to democracy in Germany, for which it has received top funding from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, among others.

Verena Güntner, born in Ulm in 1978, played in the theatre for many years after studying acting. Her debut novel "Es bringen" was published in 2014 and her second novel "Power" was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2020 and awarded the Schubart Literature Prize in 2021. As part of the feminist literature collective LIQUID CENTER, Verena Güntner published the collective novel "Wir kommen" together with Elisabeth R. Hager and Julia Wolf in 2024. She lives with her family in Berlin.