It was a harsh winter for Bertolt Brecht in Berlin in 1922, when as an aspiring young man he had just moved away from "the black woods", his home town of Augsburg. In one of Brecht's early city poems, Vom Armen B. B. (1926-27), post-revolutionary Berlin shows its merciless, everyday and challenging face.
For Brecht's Chinese friends in Shanghai today, in 2022, it is a harsh winter. Three migrant workers, drifting along and struggling not to perish. Their accounts are representative of the experience of millions of underserved migrant workers in China. What causes their lives and aspirations to collide in Shanghai? What do they have to say about the constructive and destructive effects of Shanghai on their work, their lives or even their existence? VABEL - Vom Armen Bb Et aL attempts to embody the experience of localization among migrant workers through creative formal means, presenting the story of the protagonists as a Brechtian fable shaped in close relation to their social interactions and losses. In VABEL -Vom Armen Bb Et aL, the protagonists' humorous dialogues in different dialects, paired with puppetry, collage and more, compose the city poem of Shanghai, China, 2022.
Concept and direction by Siting Yang
Dramaturgy and production design by Yizhou Zhang

Text rights:
Suhrkamp publishing house / Brecht heirs

Recording and streaming as part of BRECHT DIGITAL. Supported within the framework of "dive in. Program for Digital Interactions" of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM) in the NEUSTART KULTUR.&quot program;