MY OBSESSION WITH HAMLETMACHINE
My Obsession With Hamletmachine is an original, evening-length dance theater piece. The work uses the many historical, political, and literary references in Heiner Müller’s play Hamletmachine as a springboard to reevaluate public and personal history. After an intense research period investigating the references in Hamletmachine, Amy Lewis created a body of text that contains biographical and autobiographical stories, focused addressed by Müller. The retelling of the stories, which are accompanied and commented on by dance, an abstract and silent media, reshapes and resets the past, and, in turn, recontextualizes the present. Müller calls Hamletmachine “the description of a petrified hope, an effort to articulate a despair so it can be left behind” (Hamletmachine and Other texts for the Stage, 50). What can we leave behind after all that Müller has brought us has been visited, scrutinized, witnessed, and picked apart?
November 7-16, 2025
Dance Mission Theater
3316 24th Street
San Francisco, CA 94110