Ich bin nicht tot

As soon as we get older, some thoughts keep us awake at night: How the last years of our lives be like? Where will we live and how will we pay our bills? Who will love and take care of us?

Young, beautiful, productive – if you don’t have all these qualities, you will struggle in today’s society. And even though society is getting older, senior citizens are disappearing from public life; from political, erotic and artistic everyday life. The pandemic is making the situation worse for many elderly people. Isolated and excluded, it is often others who decide their fate for them.  

In Lola Arias’ latest work, a diverse group of people over sixty-five years old and caretakers refuse to become extras in this science fiction film that life has become. The protagonists have lived Nazism, 68’s, the rise of feminism and now, the pandemic. Rebellious, disobedient, desirous, they spurn their assigned place in this social theatre and call on others to revolt. In a glass house with a complex artifact of live cameras, archive material, chats, zooms and music, the performers confront us with our past, present and future.

“I’m not dead” is a play positioned at the intersection between reality and fiction, and, in cooperation with the Schauspiel Hannover, it crosses over into the new season 21/22.

Lola Arias is a theatre and film director, author and performer. Her work brings together people from different backgrounds (war veterans, former communists, migrant children, etc.) in theatre, film, literature, music and visual art projects. Lola Arias participated in the festival in 2010 with “That Enemy Within”, in 2014 with “The Year I Was Born” and in 2016 with “Minefield”.