“Atlas – Interwoven Realities” is a multilingual, interdisciplinary performance that blends theater, dance, music, and a fashion show. Three people with different experiences, languages, and habits come together in a limited space—the stage. They can’t leave this space and must get along with one another. From this constellation, dynamics of curiosity and timidity, closeness and distance, interest and conflict unfold.
Through the body, voice, movement, and textiles, the performers explore questions of identity, belonging, and community—not only intellectually, but in a tangible and experiential way. The focus is on the tension between boundaries and transitions—physical, emotional, cultural, and social.

Multilingualism is employed in the performance as a deliberately chosen stylistic device. It goes beyond mere communication and unfolds its impact as an aesthetic, dramaturgical, and political strategy. Different languages create their own atmospheres, rhythms, and timbres that are effective even beyond the realm of comprehension. Through shifts in language and games of translation, questions of identity, belonging, and power are explored. At the same time, the juxtaposition and interweaving of languages make it tangible how difference does not divide, but rather opens up new forms of coexistence. Subtitles or captions are deliberately omitted. Not understanding individual languages is accepted as part of the experience and requires patience—for communication arises just as much through action, movement, and encounter.

The project was conceived by costume designer and textile artist Camille Schwarz, who places textile design at the center as an artistic medium in its own right. This brings to light an often-overlooked aspect of theater—as an aesthetic and political gesture that challenges hierarchies in the theater world and strengthens costume design as an independent form of expression. Camille Schwarz is realizing the project together with actress and director Loes Snijders—her mother. This creates an intergenerational artistic dialogue in which experience and experimentation, tradition and innovation productively converge. This exchange shapes their working method, fosters the transfer of knowledge, and encourages reflection on artistic responsibility and collaborative learning.

The title “Atlas – Interwoven Realities” brings together multiple layers of meaning that are interwoven within the performance. An atlas is a collection of maps—drawn representations that provide orientation but also construct boundaries. It serves as a reminder that territories and nation-states are human-made concepts. As a textile, Atlas refers to a lustrous weave whose threads intertwine to form a stable yet supple whole—an image of connection rather than separation, of identity unfolding between the self and the other. In mythology, Atlas bears the weight of the heavens—a symbol of the individual and collective burdens of origin, memory, and responsibility. In anatomy, the cervical vertebra named after him supports the head—as a transition between thought and action, theory and practice.
Thus, the performers themselves become atlases: they carry their worlds, move within the tension between closeness and distance, and create new horizons. Atlas thus stands for connection, transformation, and the search for community beyond fixed boundaries.