Projected consciousness: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s first stage production is showing for the first time in the German-speaking region at the steirischer herbst festival.
19 € Single ticket
24 € Combined ticket “Cemetery of Splendour” & “Fever Room”
It’s probably fair to say that no other film-maker can build up an atmosphere of mysticism and mystery without any horror effects as skillfully as Apichatpong Weerasethakul. In unassuming fashion, the deceased ancestors and phantoms that haunt in his films, still get very much under our skin.
Weerasethakul takes a step closer to his audience with his very first piece for theatre by reversing viewing conditions from the beginning: Once the audience have taken their seats on the stage, the auditorium is transformed into an uncanny projection screen for a bewitching blurring of reality and fantasy. Jen and Itt, the protagonists from Weerasethakul’s latest film “Cemetery of Splendour”, also inhabit this “Fever Room”. They meet in a dream, their memories merging with those of the director to form a fiction. The fact that his characters take refuge in dream worlds also has a political background: Because of its military dictatorship, Thailand has been on the brink of collapse for years.
“Fever Room” documents a personal and national history as if everything were very soon to disappear. As in “Cemetery of Splendour”, the hospital is once again a locus of transition and transcendence. With the “sequel” to this much-acclaimed film in three-dimensional space, Apichatpong Weerasethakul has created his first, highly unconventional stage production.
Direction Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Production Sompot Chidgasornpongse
Sound design Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr
Sound design and music Koichi Shimizu
Visual director Rueangrith Suntisuk
Licht Pornpan Arayaveerasid
Production assistance and photography Chaisiri Jiwarangsan
Produktion assistance Piti Boonsom
Produced by Kick the Machine Films & Asian Arts Theatre, Gwangju, South Korea
Co-produced by steirischer herbst
steirischer herbst
Head of Project Management Dominik Jutz
Project Management Roland Gfrerer
Technical Direction Karl Masten
Grazer Spielstätten
Technical Direction Kurt Schulz
Apichatpong Weerasethakul (TH)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, born in Bangkok in 1970, works as a film director and script-writer, but is also active in visual and performance art. Weerasethakul began making short films while still taking his bachelor’s course in Architecture at the University of Khon Kaen. In 1999, two years after obtaining his master’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he founded his own production firm Kick the Machine Films, that presented Weerasethakul’s first full-length film the following year, the documentary “Dokfar Nai Meu Marn (Mysterious Objects at Noon)“. By breaking with classical narrative structures and examining such topics as memory, politics and sociology, Weerasethakul became one of Asia’s most well-known and prize-winning directors. His feature film “Lung Boonmee Raluek Chat (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives)“ (2010), for example, was awarded the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival – with Weerasethakul becoming the first Thai to receive this distinction. Alongside making films, Apichatpong Weerasethakul also works as an installation artist, exhibiting at the dOCUMENTA (13) and the Tate Gallery, among other venues. “Fever Room“, his first stage production, is showing for the first time in the German-speaking world at steirischer herbst.