Top Highlights from the Aschaffenburg Storytelling Festival 2023: Funny, Scary, Beautiful

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Aschaffenburg Storytelling Festival: Hofgarten invites you to a mental cinema under the motto “Crimetime” – from funny to scary and then beautiful

October 30, 2023 – 5:58 p.m

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Aschaffenburg, Hofgarten Aschaffenburg Storytelling Festival 2023 with Sonja Tritschler (host), Antje Horn from Jena (pictured), Monika Lößl from Erding, Gregor von Papp from Würzburg and Tristan Schulz on the piano. Photo: Petra Reith

Photo: Petra Reith

Aschaffenburg, Hofgarten Aschaffenburg Storytelling Festival 2023 with Sonja Tritschler (host), Antje Horn from Jena, Monika Lößl from Erding, Gregor von Papp from Würzburg (pictured) and Tristan Schulz at the piano. Photo: Petra Reith

Photo: Petra Reith

The Aschaffenburg storytelling festival was well advanced on Friday when the Thuringian storyteller Antje Horn took the Hofgarten stage again and told one last story in front of a sold-out audience.

The Aschaffenburg storytelling festival was well advanced on Friday when the Thuringian storyteller Antje Horn took the Hofgarten stage again and told one last story in front of a sold-out audience. And it went like this: The truth, lonely and naked, once met a stranger in a market square. The stranger was wrapped in colorful cloths and surrounded by people who listened to her and admired her. However, people often ran away from the truth. In the evening, the stranger shared her secret with the naked truth: it was her colorful appearance that made people happy. Finally, the stranger who called herself history gave the naked truth a few colors – a yellow cloth, a red one, a little orange and a little green – so that she too would have an easier time with people. Since then, so the story goes, the truth has traveled around the world in the colorful clothes of history. Antje Horn’s parable explains the human need for stories: when told successfully, they illustrate truth and the world. It was a final act of storytelling in which tone, pace, facial expressions and gestures play just as important a role as the content itself. The aim was always for the audience to not only hear scenes, but also see, feel, perhaps even taste and smell them let. And yet the naked truth didn’t fit at all with the rest of the evening, which in this year’s edition was themed “Crimetime”. Why? A medical emergency in the audience had brought the crime evening to an abrupt end shortly before. According to information from event organizers, the affected person is now doing well again. And out of consideration for the incident, the story-telling festival should not end on the note of the crime as planned. Instead, the artist team led by organizer Sonja Tritschler concluded what had been a successful evening with Antje Horn’s spontaneous “bedtime story” and a final piece by the Seligenstadt pianist Tristan Schulz, who had accompanied the evening on the piano up to that point. Up to this point, all invited artists had presented at least one of their stories, so that the motto of the evening was not neglected. In addition to Antje Horn and initiator Sonja Tritschler, Monika Lößl was also back on stage. The “charming Bavarian,” as Tritschler announced her, has been part of the storytelling festival since 2016. Gregor von Papp from Würzburg was there for the first time. A wide range The four storytellers showed a wide range in both content and delivery. There was Papp, for example, who opened the evening with a story that was more beautiful than scary about how he accidentally tore the moon from the sky over Würzburg – and with this freely invented story he framed the Grimm fairy tale “The Moon.” The lecture was brought to life primarily by Papp’s pronounced, almost pantomimic use of gestures. Rather, Antje Horn brought the characters in her stories to life with her voice. She talked about her great-aunt Anna, who played an unpopular troublemaker and an equally unpleasant police officer against each other until they smashed each other’s heads – and her great-aunt could finally practice the piano in peace. Monika Lößl’s story was similarly witty and driven by her voice, although much darker in content. In it, a naive wife sent her sick-bed-bound husband to the afterlife by playing him the wrong music. In short: stories full of macabre comedy. When Tritschler himself took the stage, it quickly became clear: it was now crime time. With a serious expression and a taut posture, she created an atmosphere right from the start as she took her listeners into the living room of a young couple. She: pregnant. Him: about to break up. And a few moments later he was already dead, killed by a frozen leg of lamb. In order to cover her tracks and avoid giving birth to the child in prison, the murderer simply served the investigators her murder weapon for dinner. Using only your voice and your own body to paint pictures in the air and in people’s heads: this is the task that narrators take on. Minimal means with maximum effect, so to speak. The pull of this art form is great, as the sold-out Hofgarten once again proved. And so the guests of the storytelling festival left their seats with more than one story in mind, although life is sometimes more unpredictable than the best criminal.

Annika Namyslo

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