About the work
Genesis is a devised work by Bastian Reiber and his team at Berlin's Schaubühne, with Reiber responsible for direction and concept. It received its world premiere on 30 November 2023. The production incorporates passages from Valère Novarina's La chair de l'homme, published in German in part as 311 Gottesdefinitionen. Schaubühne explicitly identifies Genesis as a new world-premiere work rather than simply an adaptation of Novarina.
Plot
An actor walks onto the stage and discovers that he appears to have entered the wrong play. The set has not been constructed, wooden boxes fill the room, yet the audience is already waiting. From this theatrical error comes the necessity of creating something out of nothing. The possibility that a mistake may be not only failure but a creative principle becomes central. The actor turns into an unwilling creator of a theatrical world whose rules emerge only during the performance itself.
Cultural significance
Genesis reflects on the elementary conditions that make theatre possible: performer, audience, material, expectation and the question of when an action becomes art. It turns incompleteness and failure into its dramaturgical engine and combines this meta-theatrical situation with material from Novarina. The production also represents Reiber's second directing project in the Schaubühne studio.