After "Quartett" which premiered last year at Landestheater Tübingen, Brigitte Maria Mayer in residence at Charim Factory is preparing her next theater/film work, based on Heiner Müller's adaptation of the Sophoclean Philoktet. Primarily, advancing the conceptual development of the play's content. As this stage of development - the three main characters from three different generations of masculinity converse with each other: Philoktet, the senior, the last "true" hero, cut off and rendered useless by age and illness, marooned somewhere in the East, navigates aggrieved and humiliated in suicidal mode, while his foster son Odysseus, the "new," hero, deceives and dissembles, is a hero of our post-factual age, beyond truth and good decency. Yet Odysseus needs the "infallible weapons" of Philoctet to remain in power. He instrumentalizes the youngest of the troupe, Neoptolemus, to procure them with a lie, but the latter relies on the power of truth and on the utopia of a possible better world, for now, in his first mission. Beyond the develpment of Philoktet she will use the residency to develop first sketches for future scripts, stage design and costumes. 

Brigitte Maria Mayer (*1965 in Regensburg) studied photography and performance at the Kunsthochschule in Kassel from 1986-90. Since 1990 Mayer has lived and worked as a photographer, film and theater director in Berlin. Her oeuvre is characterized above all by an intensive examination of material from the Christian tradition. Her work includes numerous image cycles, video installations and films. Mayer constantly questions social structures in relation to religion and negotiates thematic complexes such as gender roles, sexual identity and trauma.