In the old days, cities were built around factories. Today, the factories are built far outside the city boundaries. The laws of modern labour were once dictated by the factory; now the laws of the market stipulate the products as well as the production rates and values.

Factories are places of encounter between the social classes, from cleaning staff over assembly line workers to quality managers and sales directors up to the factory owner. Each one has an individual relationship to their work and to the factory. They are bound together by rules and contracts. The rules define who does what, the movements of people, the course of the working day.

What does the workers’ day look like? Do they see and hear the same things every day? And, if so: are their thoughts also identical, day in, day out?

The audience travels by coach to the fringes of the city, where they look at a factory that might be a stage set. Walking along the assembly line, they listen to the voices of staff in various departments, who stop work for a moment in order to give an account of their day-to-day experiences. The participants go on a factory excursion, but instead of learning how things are made they embark on a subjective journey into the minds of the workers...

What, exactly, is the factory of today? Why are the machines still manned by human beings? Why do machines repeat the same movements?

Gerardo Naumann, Buenos Aires

The work of Gerardo Naumann (b. 1974) doesn’t need the literary text as a driving force of fiction, neither the theatre building as a place of representation. He rather finds his texts and spaces in the real world. In “Emily” the actors repeat fragments of a book for learning languages in a furniture shop. In “Una obra útil” (“A Useful Play”) the text is based on a maid’s diary, found in a rubbish tip. On stage, Naumann, two actors and twenty extras reconstruct the diary in a schoolyard.
Naumann was a dramaturgue for “Sentate! Un zoostituto“ (“Sit! A Zoo Agent”, directed by Stefan Kaegi). His plays have been performed in Argentina, Portugal and Ireland.
Naumann has also worked in film, writing the script for “Uruguay”, a docudrama feature, and co-directing the documentary short “Novios del Campo” (“Countryside Sweethearts”) with Nele Wohlatz.
Naumann was awarded a grant to participate in the Theaterforum Berliner Festspiele (2007) and he tutored on the final project at the Akademi for Scenekunst (Norway).