My First Sony

Stéphane Bittoun is a theatre and film director, writer and actor. In his plays he combines text, performance elements and experiments with various forms of media. This project was based on the novel My First Sony by the Israeli author Benny Barbasch. The novel is a portrayal of modern-day Israel mirrored in the seemingly ordinary depiction of a family history. The ten-year-old Jotam receives a cassette player for his birthday and begins to record everything around him - arguments, sex, parties, the daily life of his entire family. Stéphane Bittoun used this acoustic archive as the basis for his adaptation and supplemented the recordings with other material, such as records, slides and super-8 movies. The adaptation became a mosaic of audio recordings, theatre elements, choreography and film, and provided insights into the history and daily life of Israel in commemoration of its 60th anniversary.

Author: Benny Barbasch (IL)
Director and co-author: Stéphane Bittoun
Singer/songwriter: Odelia BenAvi (IL), Dramaturge: Miriam Würtz, Camera: Mark Liedke, Film editing: Jörn Lemmer, Photographer: Katharina Ivaniševiç (HR), Composer: Stefan Lupp, Stage design: Stéphane Bittoun, Brita Kloss, Nina Zoller, Actors: Selda Kaya, Rebecca Rudolph, Dennis Cubic, Peter Dischkow, Ralph Gander

Schedule and venues:
Premiere: 25 Sept. 2008 with additional performances between 26 Sept. and 1 Oct. 2008 Frankfurt am Main, Mousonturm
Additional performances in Düsseldorf, Münster, Bonn, Leipzig, Stuttgart and Tel Aviv, Israel