5000 Love Letters
5000 Love Letters allow one to listen to letters written by lovers of every age over the course of one hundred years. At a bar one can choose from twelve hours of declarations of love, parting words or secret messages arranged on fifty cassettes.
The project was first produced in 2004 by Mats Staub and designer Barbara Pulli at the Theater Neumarkt in Zürich–the letters came from the ‘Zürich Love Letter Archive’ an unpublished academic collection of over 5000 love letters. In February 2005 Mats Staub and Svetlana Marchenko developed a Russian version in St. Petersburg that subsequently toured to Moscow, Novgorod and Ekaterinburg. For the Wiener Festwochen 2006 love letters were collected from all over Austria, recorded by 84 speakers and presented in five coffee houses in Vienna during the Wiener Festwochen.
This first project already contains much of what consistently characterises Mats Staub’s later works: it is polyphonic; it works with the collected real-life experiences of people who are not famous; it combines different ages; it is organised chronologically; it had a range of versions for different countries and contexts; it provided a volume of material too large for a single visit and required the audience to make a personal choice.
Press
“The project 5000 Love Letters that began in Zürich, continued in Moscow and has now arrived in Austria is essentially a piece of investigative research into the history of mental attitudes, whose highlights are presented in artistically-processed form. It offers insights into how our understanding of love has changed emotionally, erotically and sexually over the course of one hundred years and how intimate with each other people might then and may now become through language.”
Wiener Zeitung, 17.05.2006
“The letters offer the broadest possible picture of what love is, show that it is not exclusive to one age group and illustrate the troubles it often has to overcome to survive.“
The St. Petersburg Times, 15.02.2005
“The sentences flow or stick in your throat, your pen… The world is seen afresh, reinvented along with the words to describe it regardless of the fact that letters have acquired a different status in the age of the telephone, e-mail and texting. The team has edited together ten hours of love stories and anyone who fails to recognize any part of themselves in the hells and heavens of these completely normal people has never been in love.”
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 14.02.2004
Stations
2006 |
Vienna |
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Winterthur |
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Bern |
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2005 |
Lucerne |
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Ekaterinburg |
Festival Na Grani |
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Novgorod |
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Moskau |
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Sankt Petersburg |
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2004 |
Wohlen |
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Solothurn |
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Zurich |
Credits
Concept, Dramaturgy |
Mats Staub |
Concept, Design |
Barbara Pulli |
Sound Supervisor |
Fritz Rickenbacher, Susanne Affolter (Zürich); Vadim Rokizkij (St. Petersburg); Ernst Zettl, Uli Guggenberger, Volker Werner, Florian Widhalm, Hans Wagner, Ulrich Treutwein (Wien) |
Colaboration Production |
Andreas Bögli (Zürich), Ali Zhamaletdinow (St. Petersburg) |
Dramaturgiy, Casting Vienna |
Elisabeth Schack |
Assistant Vienna |
Anna Latsanich, Susanne Pirker |
Production Manager |
Svetlana Marchenko (St. Petersburg), Celestine Kubelka (Wien) |