Student Culture in Leipzig.

This week I took in two theater pieces the first on Thursday night. A Piece called Familienportrait which was held in The 4Room bar on Täubchenweg with free entry (with donations taken for the ANDAS organization) The play featured a story about about a dysfunctional family thrown into crisis when a girlfriend of one of the sons reveals she is pregnant. The play focuses largely on the efforts  mother Louis struggling to keep her head above water while surrounded by her oddball children.

My German held up enough to follow the story and the excellent physical acting of the cast was more than enough to fill in the blanks.

The story delved into family values, depression and suicide but held a very strong sense of bitter comedy throughout. The highlights for me where the performances of the stoic Albert and the animated Patrick providing a nice contrast and both actors turning in a very solid and funny performance especially The Albert character who despite having few lines and a mostly emotionless demeanor managed to find moments of great comedic value. The costumes used gave for a very nice aesthetic value and the play on the whole was a thoroughly well put together amateur piece

The following night I went to a student variety show event hell by the WILMA group. The show featured a series of short plays, musicians, singers and dancers. Again a wholly enjoyable evening was had. The show opened with several short plays . A young man looking through a sketchpad and building a story out of each drawing was used as a framing device. The best one was a telling of the story of Pinocchio with an interesting twist. The event which was largely but together by international students and  had each character speak in their home language, ranging from English,French, Italian, Spanish etc. It provided an interesting idea about how a story like Pinocchio can largely be told through familiarity and body language.

The action went from that to an acoustic guitar performance and a Mariachi band. One of the highlights was a performance of the ballet The Dying Swan performed by Vera Djemelinskaya.

The two days of theater made certain  that Leipzig is not short on talented young people.