Dad, Your Archive and Me

Description

You must know that this text is connected to the landscape. You must know that this story is connected to agriculture. Whoever wants to tell it must have tended or milked at least ten cows in their life, or have gotten up multiple times in a row at four in the morning. A complex father-son story
The center of the theater text by Asa Hendry is the relationship of a young farmer with his taciturn father. The poignant monologue in 14 images tells how the son preserves the father's story – almost like a living archive of the ancestors. Tormented by guilt and shame, he faces the decision: to follow the father's silence or to care for his own exhaustion and depression. The three Grisons actors Lorenzo Polin, Bistgaun Capaul, and Lorin Könz, aged between 15 and 75, bring this complex story of the father-son relationship to the stage. The story is inseparably intertwined with the landscape, the silence, and a past that the son himself does not know. The production premiered in 2025 at the Zuoz Globe as part of the Rhaeto-Romanic theater festival "festival Travers" and showcases the dimension of transgenerational traumas in agriculture and seeks traces of the violence that many shepherd children have had to endure in the Grisons Alps. Throughout the evening, traces of an increasingly decaying language become visible and audible, telling of isolation and yearning for connection. The piece is performed in three idioms: Vallader, Puter, and Sursilvan. With a mix of poetic and narrative elements, Asa Hendry's bilingual text opens new perspectives on Rhaeto-Romanic theater creation. For this piece, Hendry also received the Swiss Literature Prize 2026. The production by director Rebekka Bangerter, who offers a loving look at men and their entanglements in traditional roles between village theater and male choir, was on the shortlist of the Swiss Theater Meeting 2026.