«Palmasola» – Klara Theatre Productions at Fitaz [BO]

In order to investigate how the drug market involves different groups and areas, but affects each one very unequally, the group Klara [CH] set out to investigate: what are law and justice – on paper and in practice?

This is how the theatre project «Palmasola», directed by Christoph Frick, developed. Premiered in 2019, the show is scheduled to be performed at the Fitaz – Festival Internacional de Teatro de La Paz [BO] in May 2022.

The work’s title is a reference to a prison-city in Santa Cruz de la Sierra [BO], a settlement of huts surrounded by walls that was built in the late 1980s. It is currently home to 6,000 inmates, including convicted criminals, pre-trial detainees, men and women, families and children. In Palmasola, one can see the extremes of social and economic differences.

This population within the walls was virtually left to its own devices, until a raid on 14 March 2018, which turned the prisoners’ daily lives upside down with unprecedented brutality.

In its staging, Klara confronts questions of law and justice, the organisation of communities and the perception of the world by children growing up in prison.

ABOUT THE GROUP

Klara Theatreproduktionen (Klara Theatre Production) was founded in Basel in 1991 by the directing duo Christoph Frick (its current director) and Jordy Haderek. Inspired by visual art and music, the group explores the possibilities of the medium of theatre from its margins. Klara embarks on a search for contemporary, urban narratives and reflects on itself as theatre – and is constantly thinking about its possibilities. The group conducts play research, allows narratives to collide with abstraction and vice versa. In addition to performances at guest theatres and festivals in Switzerland, Klara has played internationally at the impulse Festival, the Bonn Biennale, the Time Festival in Ghent, the Freiburg Theatre Festival, the First International Drama Festival in Lahore (Pakistan) and co-produced with the Kaserne Basel, the Lucerne Theatre, the Theater Spektakel Zurich, the Steirischer Herbst in Graz and Victoria (now campo) in Ghent and the Theater Freiburg and pvc tanz.