Fast Forward 2025

What is a biography? One topic given in the third year of the directing degree at the Academy of Performing Arts Baden-Württemberg is: develop a play based on your own biography. Aleksandr Kapeliush, who was born in 1999 in St. Petersburg in Russia, has been studying theatre directing in Germany since 2024, because he couldn’t continue his studies at the Moscow theatre academy GITIS. Although still quite young, several conflicts in current world events already crisscross his life story. His “biopic” – ruthlessly honest – begins with a journey into the past, to his family’s living-room when he was five years old, and from there takes us step by step back into his present and our own. To do this, the director, author and performer pulls out all the theatrical stops on a tiny stage. He tells the story, acts, sings, dances, cuts up pop made in America with Tchaikovsky’s SWAN LAKE. From SWAN LAKE, “holy” SWAN LAKE, Kapeliush takes the dramaturgy for his living-room ballet, of course newly interpreted and with a few crucial changes in the staging.
Aleksandr Kapeliush’s autobiographical project turned out to be a play with extraordinary relevance. All over the world, political positions that view multiculturalism and minority and human rights as a threat to the social order, and that want to return to “God given” normative models of life and the state, are becoming more influential. These are political ideas that directly target people’s biographies.

With Aleksandr Kapeliush

Text, Music & Directing Aleksandr Kapeliush

Choreographical Support Leonid Leontev Sound Dmitry Klenin Special Guest M. Amin Zariouh Voice Germaine Sollberger Mentoring Thomas Zielinski Artistic Director ADK Ludger Engels Technical Director ADK Friedemann Klappert Production Management ADK Monika Schumm Production performance in the third year of the Bachelor’s Degree Programme in directing at the Akademie für Darstellende Kunst Baden-Württemberg (ADK) in cooperation with Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg  Photos Steven M. Schultz, Stella Butz (Portrait Aleksandr Kapeliush)

Special thanks to Jana Riese, Florian Esche, Truike van der Poel, Seraphyma Chelina For, with and about Marina Solopchenko, Emil Kapeliush, Vera Latysheva