The Earth is Flat

A project by Studio Julian Hetzel in collaboration with Stary National Theater Krakow (PL)
Premiere 18.10.2024 @ Stary Theater Krakow

Everything you believe in is wrong!
The Earth is Flat (Ziemia jest Płaska) is a project about the challenges of different worldviews colliding.

Taking the form of an experimental nature documentary, the work explores the edges of reality, truth and belief systems in an increasingly polarised society. The Earth is Flat questions what we know about the world by challenging the findings of science. What if our planet is not spherical but a frisbee-like disk. What if gravity is only a theory? What if climate change does not exist? What if abortion is murder? What if refugees are eating our children? What if birds aren’t real? With the camera as a witness, this performance questions documentation as evidence in the service of truth and the media as an accelerant for emotions in politics.

Together with the ensemble of the Stary National Theatre in Krakow, Studio Julian Hetzel examines how groups claim the truth as well as moral authority. The group of performers become different modes of social entanglements, forming a society on scale. From primal apes to a nationalist choir, from cannibal tribes to a scientific crew, these groups keep on informing us about their identities and cosmovisions. The Earth is Flat looks at how belief-systems are established and manifested – and how they are being overthrown. One system eats the other and builds upon the ruins of the previous one. Over and over again.

Nowadays, politics have become so emotional that an open conversation between people with different worldviews has become seemingly impossible. How did we get to this point? How is hate organised and why is fear so effective? Whom do we trust and what do we believe in? What happens when fact is fiction?

Studio Julian Hetzel invites you to take a look over the skyline of the flat earth, to peak over the horizon in order to see what lays behind. The Earth is Flat is a playground to confront you with unlikely propositions. The Earth is Flat takes you on a multidisciplinary journey through landscapes and scale models that move, rotate and are eaten up by events. If you see this show your world will stand still. And yet it moves…