Familienbande

Theater
Directed by Lola Arias

Soundtrack

An eleven year old girl describes her family:
¨My mother falls in love with my father. I am born. My parents brake up. My father moves away and my mother falls in love with a woman. This woman becomes my second mother.  My mother and my mother want a baby. They ask my father if he can help. My father says yes. A baby is born, my brother Moses, the son of my father and my second mother. Do you understand? It sounds complicated, but it’s not¨

Familienbande is the portrait of a family in Schmieden, a village in the South of Germany. It sounds like an extraordinary story, but it is a play about an ordinary family.

Familienbande is a diary of all the members of this family. The family takes the stage to represent their everyday life -waking up, going to the supermarket, doing the laundry, feeding the rabbits, singing country songs- while we listen to their dreams, fears, secrets, thoughts, childhood memories. 
The evening is located on the border between reality and fiction. The actors play their own role to reflect about the meaning of family roles. What does it mean to be a mother? What is the role of the father when there are two mothers? What do children need? What is the meaning of family? A group of people related by blood, election, love? Which ways of living together are we looking for? What kind of society will emerge from future families?
Family relationships are like an invisible cord, that sometimes sustains us, sometimes is broken, sometimes is very fragile and sometimes so heavy, that it is like a chain. This family portrait makes this invisible cord visible.