How to Make a Life
With the festival “How to Make a Life” this coming autumn 2026, the Frankfurt Mousonturm aims to address a pressing, socially relevant and often suppressed topic – age(ing). The programme focuses on the underrepresentation of aging bodies and voices in theatre and questions conventional views of youth, performance and availability. Co-curated by the South African choreographer Boyzie Cekwana, the event includes international perspectives on demographic change. The festival will feature world and national premieres, as well as guest performances from the fields of dance, performance, theatre, participative works and cross-genre formats.
The Chinese artist Wen Hui (65), for example, is developing a dance piece with women over 60 that imagines the body as an archive. Together the performers explore sources of strength from migration backgrounds, crises, awakenings and physical changes. The American dance pioneer Deborah Hay (84) will present her latest piece “Performance Club”, a durational performance that pushes the boundaries between performer and audience and between art and life. Forced Entertainment reflects on what ageing means to a theatre collective with a return to one of its legendary works, “12am: Awake & Looking Down”, performed for the first time in 1993. The Australian artist Samara Hersch will present her 1:1 online performance “Sex and Death on the Internet” in Germany for the first time. The director Stéphanie Aflalo will present her new piece, in which she has a conversation with her father on his impending death. The Lebanese artist Danya Hammoud will develop a site-specific performance with people between the ages of 14 and 100 who confront and reconsider images of belonging. The Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula (51) has a 75-year-old former dancer venture out in search of the first Ballet National du Zaïre. The installation “The Lesser Told Story” by Boyzie Cekwana gathers a multitude of perspectives on art, life and age(ing), read aloud by various artists, e.g. Tim Etchels, Deborah Hay and Wen Hui.
The programme will be supplemented by an open, intergenerational kitchen, conceived and headed by the Frankfurt theatre collective andpartnersincrime under the direction of Eleonora Herder. As a venue devoted to personal encounter, the kitchen will serve as a place for new perspectives, empathy and social bonding in response to a complex theme that already or will eventually impact us all at some point.
Artistic direction: Boyzie Cekwana, Alexandra Hennig, Anna Wagner
Artists: Deborah Hay, Wen Hui, Faustin Linyekula, Danya Hammoud, andpartnersincrime, Forced Entertainment, Tim Etchells, Samara Hersch and others
Dates
17 September 2026 – 3 October 2026: Festival
Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm | Frankfurt am Main