CONTENTS

Boxer Jenny is about to have her all-important fight: if she wins, a great career beckons. If she loses, she has to give up her dream. We learn all this in a mini radio play that runs at the beginning of the BOX SALON. Singer Andromahi Raptis as Jenny and the evening’s pianist as her opponent compete against each other in an exhibition match. Jenny is knocked out – and has lost everything.

A woman lies prostrate on the floor in the ring, thus beginning the musical part of the evening, a powerful one-woman show. Because Jenny gets up and fights on. Not against her opponent, because she won, but with herself. She cries, she screams, she throws everything away – and yet in the end she finds something like peace.

The BOX-SALON deals with the grief that hits us when we have lost great things and a part of ourselves dies. Dealing with this usually takes place in five specific phases: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance of the situation. In this song production, we experience the grieving process through the songs of John Dowland and Kurt Weill.

On the surface, their very different works sometimes tell different frame stories, but behind the scenes they fit into the universal phases of coping with grief. The songs from the 16th and the first half of the 20th century touch us directly and give us an idea of how timelessly grief is perceived, lived through and processed. The inner battle of the defeated boxer is fought by athletes from BOXWERK München.

The venue for the world premiere on September 12, 2020 was the BOXWERK in Munich’s Maxvorstadt district. The audience sat on gym benches around the ring, between punching bags hanging from the ceiling. The production was successfully revived at the ID-Festival Berlin, the Mozartfest Augsburg and the HIDALGO Festival, among others.