Ulrike OttingerThe Hearing TrumpetBased on the novel by Leonora Carrington Translated into German by Tilman Spengler Adapted for the stage by Ulrike Ottinger

Everyone who has read Leonora Carrington’s century-defining novel The Hearing Trumpet knows: it is an unleashing of literary energy and a surrealist revolutionary attack on the humorlessness and lack of alternatives of patriarchal power. The ninety-two-year-old heroine rebels alongside other elderly people and outcasts: What if the world had taken a different path, one not defined by greed and violence?

Carrington responds with humor, taking the world literally in all its grotesque details. Her protagonists are “freaks,” to borrow a word from the work of Ulrike Ottinger: figures of hope because they do not fit in, and precisely for this reason open up spaces for new ways of thinking and change. They are vulnerable and at risk. It is the transformation of this vulnerability into strength that gives the story its irrepressible power.

Ulrike Ottinger, the queen of transdisciplinary resistance to authority and uniformity in art, theater, and cinema, met Carrington in Chicago in 1991. Together, they developed the idea for an adaptation of The Hearing Trumpet. Thirty-five years later, this idea becomes reality at the Gorki.

Carrington’s surrealist world theater meets Ottinger’s own visual and intellectual universe: her fascination with outsiders, eccentrics, and figures who refuse to conform to the rules of their time. On stage, this becomes a world somewhere between the grotesque and the utopian, where old age becomes revolutionary energy, imagination becomes political force, and the supposedly out of place becomes the starting point for a new order.

The theater event is accompanied by an exhibition featuring further works by Ulrike Ottinger.