For Time is Life

Having just reached puberty, the Waldorf curriculum offers eighth-grade students the opportunity to slip into a different role and appear on stage as if hidden behind it. Depending on the Waldorf school, the class teacher and eighth graders disappear from the normal classroom routine for three to four weeks and devote all their energy to the so-called class eight play. In addition to learning the roles, they have to design canvases and posters, build sets, make or borrow costumes and find props. The tasks are varied and often impossible to accomplish without the help of parents. Over time, this creates a special kind of community of parents, young people and class teachers: you get to know each other from a completely new perspective at the end of the class teacher's time.

In the beginning was the action

From an educational point of view, the project is a training of the will par excellence at the beginning of the third year, which begins with puberty. At the age of 14, when hormones are firing and more than just the body is changing, you want to change the whole world, tackle new projects, do everything differently - but unfortunately it all starts with action. Ideas are not enough if projects are to come to earth. And so the initial enthusiasm is followed at some point by a painful awakening: The text doesn't end on page 19, props and costumes don't just appear when you have an idea of where they might be, and even canvases don't paint themselves. And then at every rehearsal you have to say: «Speak up! Clearly! Slowly!» This can be exasperating for a 14-year-old who mumbles or prefers to remain silent. And finally, the last week of rehearsals with the run-through, main and dress rehearsals: You are only allowed to be backstage, you have to be quiet, know when there are changes, where appearances are coming from and where the exits are going. And to top it all off, you have to play well. A highly complex requirement! Alertness and presence of mind are required, even late in the afternoon after a long day of rehearsals! At some point, the time finally comes when everyone thinks that it's no longer possible, and then forces are mobilized that no one previously suspected were needed.

About hour flowers, smartphones and laptops

Obviously, this challenge works particularly well for young people when there is a play that inspires the eighth grade students. In my case, Momo was a golden handle. It occurred to me that Michael Ende's «strange story of the time thieves and the child who brought back the stolen time to the people» has lost none of its poignancy — only the linguistic images and symbols from back then would have to be modernized so that they touch 14-year-olds today. Looking through the dramatization, I realized that this could be done well. The author was not yet able to address smartphones and laptops in 1973; he worked with the metaphor of the flowers of the hour, which blossom in every person's heart and are destroyed by the cigars of the grey gentlemen. In my production, instead of cigars, laptops received their energy from the hour flowers and thus enabled the gray lords and ladies to steal people's time. In the course of the play, all the people were given smartphones by the greys. As a result, neither Nina nor Nino, Nicole nor Nicola, nor Monsieur or Madame Fusi communicate directly with each other or even meet in person, but can now do everything remotely by text message, because «it saves time». The result — as in the original — is isolation, distancing, hustle and bustle and coldness.

Frighteningly real

This modernization succeeded. When, in the second half, the «children» were not — as per Michael Ende — in depots but stood in front of the backdrop of Münster's Prinzipalmarkt, typing into their cell phones and starting a computer game instead of talking to Momo, some audience members actually had tears in their eyes. The sight was just too familiar and sad.

Of course, the child Momo - whose gender was already difficult to determine in Michael Ende's play and who is now logically cast as both male and female - recaptures time from the Greys with the help of the turtle Cassiopeia and Hora, also embodied once as Madame Hora and once as Master Hora, and destroys the time machine with an hour flower. It snatches the laptop from the last of the Greys and then releases all its friends from torpor with this hour flower. So the play ended well, and that's how it should be on the stage of a class eight play.