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© Elisa Vettori -
© Matteo de Mayda -
© Elisa Vettori -
© Marco Tonino -
© Giulia Lenzi -
Die größte Tragödie der Menschheit
Italy
Humanity's Greatest Tragedy
Directing & Text
Jacopo Giacomoni
Brief description
A game about catastrophes: the audience votes the “greater” of two tragedies into the next round. What will make it to the end?
Language
Bilingual in German and English
Duration
75 min
Location
Kleines Haus
Kleines Haus Staatsschauspiel Dresden
Glacisstr. 28
01099 Dresden
KH 3
Dates
more about the artist
Content
The Italian theatre group Malmadur invites the audience to take part in a game. The aim of the game is to find “humanity’s greatest tragedy”. Each round, the audience chooses between two tragedies. The play with the most votes makes it to the next round. And it goes on like that.
In theatre, a tragedy is a misfortune. It’s caused by people, but they can’t stop it themselves. Today the media turn tragedies into images. People’s misfortune is shared, sold and exploited. The game asks: what is a tragedy?
Jacopo Giacomoni, (*1987) is a writer and actor. This is the first play he has directed. He works with the group Malmadur to try to find new forms of theatre.
The Italian collective Malmadur invites the audience to take part in a game about “humanity’s greatest tragedy”. In a knock-out process, the audience votes for which of two tragedies is the “greater” one and in this way brings it into the next round. The competition of catastrophes leads from small to big tragedies, from the banal to world events. This repeatedly raises the question of what constitutes tragedy, what it describes, what pain, what misfortune it presents to the world. As a category of theatre, tragedy describes a catastrophe that has been caused by human action, but cannot be averted by human action. In the media age, the idea of what is tragic seems to have become an important currency. Tragedies go viral, are exploited, politicised and sold, just like pain, pity, fear and anger. Is it perhaps spectacles like these that prevent us from thinking?
Jacopo Giacomoni, *1987, has a degree in philosophy and is a playwright and performer. In 2025, he won the Venice Biennale Teatro’s call for authors with his play TACET. He has been a member of the theatre collective Malmadur since 2013, which in north Italian dialect means something like “unripe” or “immature”. With Malmadur, Giacomoni is working on new experimental methods for a theatre that involves both performers and audience members equally. HUMANITY'S GREATEST TRAGEDY is his first production as a director.
With David Angeli, Theresa Maria Schlichtherle
Directing Jacopo Giacomoni
Dramaturgy Jacopo Giacomoni External Eye Gaia Bautista Organisation Marco Tonino Communications David Angeli Assistant Chiara Uliana Costume in collaboration with Angie Power Production Malmadur & Evoe! Teatro Photos Elisa Vettori, Matteo de Mayda (Portrait Jacopo Giacomoni) In collaboration with Teatro Stabile di Bolzano, Centro Servizi Culturali S. Chiara di Trento With support from Fondazione CARITRO
Finalist text of the Network Dramaturgie Nuova 2020. Selected project in 2022 as part of the call for proposals „Piattaforma per la circuitazione dello spettacolo professionale in Trentino-Alto Adige”. Sponsored by TSB, CSCSC, CTT. Winning project of the call for proposals „HUMUS 2024” des / by IAC – Centro Arti Integrate di Matera for the section „Politica e terreno comune”.
Content Notes