Ubu

Jarry's legendary anti-war farce directed by star director Robert Wilson

Alfred Jarry's "Ubu Roi" is probably the most important anti-war and totalitarianism farce in theater history. The play's preoccupation with the universality and banality of evil is still frighteningly relevant today. The Spanish-Catalan surrealist Joan Miró made his own contribution to the reception of the text with his drawings and stage characters.

Miró was not the only one who saw himself connected to the Bauhaus movement throughout his life, citing Paul Klee as a significant inspiration. The director and visual artist Robert Wilson has also repeatedly dealt with the movement – for example, in 2003 as a visiting professor at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. In a co-production with the Kunstfest Weimar, Robert Wilson realized his "theatrical action" UBU with figures based on designs by Joan Miró for Es Baluard – the Museum of Contemporary Art in Palma – last fall, which will now have its German premiere in Weimar. The result is a performance that moves between theater, soundscape, and visual art installation, an exploration of Alfred Jarry's scandalous 1896 play and the reasons for Joan Miró's long obsession with Jarry's text. Just as Mirò – considering Franco – was fascinated by Jarry's dramatic foreshadowing of Surrealism, Dadaism, and the theater of the absurd, Wilson is struck by its timeliness but also its timelessness: "It's very timely in a way, given the terrible war that's going on in Ukraine right now. And it's not unlike the period in which [Miró's] work was created, under Franco. But it's one of those myths that playwrights have written about for centuries."