Tanzende Idioten

**Lardi plays Goldie**

Goldie does what she loves best: she rebuilds her house. Her joy is as contagious as it is disturbing. The great Graubünden actress Ursina Lardi plays Goldie with impressive fire and makes Goldie's indomitable vitality shine. And at the same time it is clear to see: Goldie is seriously ill. Her mind gives her best, but her body gives up. The woman knows that she is dying and yet passionately plans a future that she no longer has. Meanwhile, her cat Apollo, played by Sebastian Blomberg, seems to enjoy Goldie's increasing weakness: he can finally lie around undisturbed on her and snore endlessly to himself. In return, Goldie can tell him things that she doesn't reveal to anyone else.

Suddenly, the doorbell rings and Goldie's newly in love father (André Jung) is at the door with his lover (Karin Neuhäuser). The two are on their way to the sea with their motorhome and pay a spontaneous surprise visit to Goldie. Completely unexpectedly, the father, almost bursting with happiness, finds himself at his own daughter's deathbed. The whole world floods into Goldie's life through the old woman's stories, everything from which it is difficult to say goodbye: forests, animals, adventure, passion and the sea. In the second part of the evening, Goldie's death is told in a poetic way. The Earth habitat is abandoned, Goldie and her companions dance through space seemingly weightlessly.

**Brutal, tender, anarchic**

In "Dancing Idiots", Ursina Lardi, Karin Neuhäuser, Sebastian Blomberg, Benjamin Eggers-Domsky, André Jung and drummer Willi Kellers play survivors of everyday life and aging. What makes them stand out is a ludicrous mixture of brutality and tenderness, anarchy and metaphysical instincts, the pain of existence and the lust for life.

The German theatre maker Thorsten Lensing wrote the text for "Dancing Idiots" for his ensemble, inspired by a story by the American Denis Johnson. In works such as "Verrückt nach Trost" (Crazy for Trost), the Chur audience has already been able to experience how Lardi, Jung, Blomberg and other allies reconstruct and celebrate the joint game live every evening.

Denis Johnson is one of the most important contemporary American authors and is highly revered by colleagues such as Jonathan Franzen, Philip Roth and David Foster Wallace for his "goosebump-inducing", "unpretentiously direct" and "brutally funny" prose. About himself and his work, he says: "I would describe my characters in the same way as I describe myself: we are dancing idiots."