Leila Hekmat – Roses Rising – The Dinner

Four guests, an opulent dinner and a longing for rebellion. What begins as a bourgeois ritual turns into intoxication, madness and revolutionary fantasy. Leila Hekmat stages a visually stunning performance between comedy and musical tableau vivant.

"Pick your pussy up off that floor and make yourself a drink."

Following the great success of "Gloriette", her first work for a theater space, Leila Hekmat is now staging her second stage production at HAU. In the performance "Roses Rising - The Dinner", the Berlin-based artist and director brings an intoxicating dinner party to the stage, in which four self-centered guests confront their exhausted hopes for collective action. What begins as a bourgeois ritual slips into escalating delusions, narcissistic urges to act, coupled with self-doubt and a sincere longing for resistance.

With handcrafted, detailed costumes and sets, "Roses Rising" unfolds in Hekmat's idiosyncratic style, combining comedy, musical tableau vivant and performance. Based on extensive research and collected material on the protest culture of the 1970s, a performative collage is created that illuminates the conscious and unconscious strategies with which people react to the crisis nature of the world.

"Roses Rising" will be presented as a two-part performance in collaboration with the Gropius Bau. The stage production "The Dinner" follows "The Movement", which will show the performative uprising that the decadent dinner party conjures up in the atrium of the Gropius Bau on March 6 and 7.