Yana Eva Thönnes

Country: Germany

Schaubühne Theatre

Biography

Yana Eva Thönnes is a playwright, performer and director. Born in Bergisch Gladbach in 1990, she lives in Munich. Yana studied philosophy and cultural studies as well as theater directing at the HfMT Hamburg.

Yana founded and directed the performance group THE AGENCY together with Magdalena Emmerig, Rahel Spöhrer and Belle Santos. THE AGENCY created immersive performances and installations from 2015-2022, dissecting the manifestations of neoliberalism showing their work in cross-disciplinary contexts a.o. Münchner Kammerspiele, Athens Biennale, Festival Internationales de Buenos Aires, Gessnerallee Zurich, Festival Radikal Jung, Pact Zollverein, Tanz im August Berlin.

At the beginning of her career with THE AGENCY, Yana also worked as an assistant director at the Münchner Kammerspiele under the directorship of Matthias Lilienthal, where she was an AD to Toshiki Okada, Trajal Harrel, Britta Thie, Felix Rothenhäusler and Gob Squad, among others.

Since 2022 Yana has been working as a playwright and solo director at institutions like Schaubühne Berlin, Residenztheater Munich and Neumarkt Zurich. Her creation  “Call Me Paris” premiered at Biennale di Venezia.

In her recent works, Yana develops an artistic form that explores the radical separation of body and language. In her precise choreographies of various figures  in systemic constellations, the dynamics of trauma and repression come to light and the bodies begin to decode the horror in their own uncanny language.

Her extensive artistic research, in which Yana prefers to approach her research subject immersively, has taken her to Japan, India and the US.

CALL ME PARIS

by Yana Eva Thönnes

Director: Yana Eva Thönnes

World Premiere

Premiere in Venice was on June 1, 2025

Premiere in Berlin will be on October 29, 2025

Concept of the Performance:

»Everyone should have fun with my image« (Paris Hilton)

Los Angeles, 2004: Paris Hilton, the heiress to the multi-million-dollar Hilton hotel empire, is on a meteoric rise from It girl to reality TV star. But just as Paris is being celebrated as the inventor of the selfie, her ex-boyfriend reveals he can offer a quite different kind of picture of the party girl: he publishes their private sex tape under the title »1 Night in Paris«. The film becomes the highest selling porn film of the Noughties. Paris tries in vain to sue for the rights to her own image.

At the same time in Germany, Bergisch Gladbach: Julia, a young blonde teenage girl, moves to the city and is immediately given the nickname ‘Paris’ at school due to her resemblance to the American It girl. She soon finds herself in her own version of the ‘1 Night in Paris’ video. She blocks out the memory of this night for a long time. Until, in 2024, she reads in Paris Hilton’s memoirs what the real Paris writes about her sex tape: ‘It was like being electronically raped.’

In search of the rights to her own image, she encounters the man who abused her in a Hilton Hotel room. An act of violence occurs. Now the man is lying face down on the bed. How could it have come to this? Suddenly, Julia is surrounded by her mother, her friends from school and the real Paris Hilton. Together they try to untangle the threads: How did she become ‘Paris’? Where is her tape? And if she is nothing more than a copy of an original, who is the girl on the tape? Who is the person behind the persona?

In the form of a memoir, Yana Eva Thönnes follows the two doppelgängers through the prism of traumatic memory and dissects the context for both these real-life-cases of the Noughties as the last unashamedly misogynistic decade, which saw the rapid expansion of an all-encompassing internet.

Artistic Statement – artist’s words :

I am interested in the mysteries of the body. In CALL ME PARIS we are confronting the nature of traumatic memory, which is a very fickle thing: In a traumatic situation certain aspects of the experience get suppressed, while others might be highlighted. We dissociate. There is a split. Now, the body might remember something the mind doesn’t. To me, that’s one of the mysteries of the body: This mysterious knowledge. What can my body tell you, that my voice and my words cannot?

In CALL ME PARIS we are exploring this split in a specific form of acting: Language and body movements are separated.

There is a saying that abuse is invisible for outsiders. I am asking: What can you see?

CREDITS

Text and Direction: Yana Eva Thönnes

Stage Design: Katharina Pia Schütz

Costume Design: Elke von Sivers

Music: Ville Haimala

Dramaturgy: Nils Haarmann

Lighting Design: Marcel Kirsten

With: Jule Böwe, Holger Bülow, Ruth Rosenfeld, Alina Stiegler

Duration: ca. 100 minutes

Co-production with La Biennale di Venezia, Schaubühne Berlin and Emilia Romagna Teatro ERT – Teatro Nazionale

Supported by Heinz und Heide Dürr Stiftung