Die Lage

Diploma by Lara Roßwag

Costume design for "Die Lage" premiere at the Staatstheater Stuttgart

"Die Lage" describes and plays with the problem of housing: rents are getting more and more expensive and the demands of landlords are getting higher and higher. The search for an apartment becomes a casting show in which rent-seekers have to undergo increasingly humiliating selection procedures, from snore tests to moan tests, until they end up naked, exposed and still without an apartment. The disadvantaged rebel and yet, in the end, they too remain players in an infinite system.

Thomas Melle strings together scenes of exemplary apartment inspections and writes pointedly and absurdly from the point of view of the various sufferers of this market.

The text does not prescribe a distribution of roles, rather the actors change their roles throughout the play and are thus sometimes real estate agents, sometimes rent seekers, sometimes previous tenants who have been given notice, sometimes flat-share residents.

My claim in the costume was to make this constant change possible and to underline it by the picture of homogeneous groups of figures. In connection with the stage, the costumes form a world of their own - a world of clear colors and shapes, somewhat sectarian, allegorical and aestheticized.