Due to the Covid-19 pandemic "Uninvited Guests: Cologne" at the Impulse Theater Festival June 2020 has been cancelled.

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Every year in Cologne hundreds of people are buried with no relatives present. Who were these people? Were they lonely? And can we feel close to someone who we never met? DARUM invite us to join them on an investigation that takes us out of the theatre to the cemetery in Deutz.

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Believing that every person deserves some continued existence in fictional form, the artists have researched the lives of people who have been buried alone in Cologne: they have attended lonely funerals, knocked on doors, spoken to neighbours and examined the traces that the departed have left behind them in this world. On the lower floor of the Tanzfaktur the audience will enter a multimedia collage made from the results of this research. Photos, notes, maps, items of furniture, songs and news reports offer some sense of the life that they are immersing themselves in. The viewers become the survivors of a person they never knew, visit a grave together and attempt rituals of farewell and of memory.

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In its genuine attempt to gain a closer knowledge of someone who has died, UNINVITED GUESTS repeatedly switches between reality and fiction. However, even if the evidence left behind is slight and the image of the dead person remains unclear the audience and the artists replace forgetting with an image they have created together that will continue to exist. A calm and deeply moving experience that encourages us to reflect on loneliness, death and the impenetrable nature of human existence.

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"Uninvited Guests: Cologne" was commissioned by the Impulse Theater Festivals based on the original production from Vienna.