aua comes your way

The 20th May

On our penultimate day of the festival, our subscribers were sent out as drug couriers by KLARA Theaterproduktionen. KLARA would have traveled to Bern with its production Palmasola, a piece in which drugs and drug smuggling play a central role. Palmasola is a prison city in Bolivia. And Bolivia is one of the most important countries for the cultivation of the coca plant. Whoever gets caught by the Bolivian police while smuggling the white gold across the continents often ends up in Palmasola. The prisoner city is currently inhabited by around 6000 persons. For the piece, the team around director Christoph Frick went on a research trip in Palmasola. They visited the detention center several times and spoke to current and former detainees, as well as lawyers and prison employees. They got an insight into different biographies and learned a lot about the reality in Bolivia. Our subscribers were sent on a journey with an interactive game. A journey where the slightest wrong decision can have devastating consequences…

In the evening at the Zoom Festival Center everyone had the opportunity to speak to the project participants from Switzerland, Germany and Bolivia. KLARA and the actors were spellbound to hear how they made it to prison, how corruption is normal there and how the children are in this special city. And once again we were amazed at how great theater can convey other realities and broaden horizons.