The excavator, resembling a menacing, violent animal emitting strange sounds, moves closer and closer. That is the way the ground is slowly pulled from under people’s feet. Starting-point is the village of Breunsdorf: located in the south of Leipzig it is slated to give way to brown-coal mining and so shares the fate of that region’s sixty or so communities. However the real issue reaches far deeper, it is all about the erasure of identities, about the uprooting of human beings.

The only possibility for daily survival is to live for the day, to ignore the looming danger. The people simply maintain their daily routines. An intricate part of those are their games and routines although these are largely overshadowed by desperation. The looming danger from brown-coal still exists now, however it is possible to compare the excavator to another, growing Moloch, namely the onslaught of cheap nickel-and-dime stores and the spread of private property that increasingly force people out of their homes and away from their ancestral soil.

Irina Pauls is concerned about the little, everyday people who are victims of those commercial massacres. What is going to happen to the woman feeding her cats, to the touchingly helpless handicapped person living far removed from reality in a world of its own, to the young bride who in an increasingly spiritless frame of mind tries to remove the growing dirt from her white wedding gown? Bernd Sikora, a renown set designer, designer for applied and free arts, architect and lecturer for spatial creation at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Leipzig, created within his scenic set design a large pool as a synonym for life. By doing so he gave the choreography extraordinarily novel possibilities.

Schauspiel Leipzig’s Dance Theatre opened its doors in 1990. After Reinhild Hoffmann in Bochum was terminated as a result of the ongoing cost-cutting measures, it is now the only dance theatre in all of Germany affiliated with a playhouse. »Südraum« (»Down South«) is already the eighth and also the most enigmatic production of its director Irina Pauls whose best-seller »Happy Schwanensee Day« is still playing after four years of performances to a sold-out house.