Story
We sit two strangers down, take away their words — and hand them back a mirror.
It didn't start as a show. It started as a way to keep a community alive when everything around it fell apart.
It began with a cancelled festival
Months of work. A team, a city getting ready, an audience already holding tickets. And then, overnight, nothing.
“We had spent months building a festival — a team, a city, an audience with tickets in hand. Then a drone crossed the sky and, for safety, it was all called off overnight. In one evening the work of dozens of people, and the community around it, had nowhere to go. I wanted to make something that could never be cancelled like that — small enough to survive anything, and large enough to matter.”
Alexander Weinstein
Producer
The world got louder — and lonelier
We message more and meet less. We keep the screen between us and the edited version on top. Whole cities pass one another every day without a single real look. We wanted to give people back the one thing that's gone quiet: the warmth of a first meeting.
“We diagnose each other all the time — you sit in a tram, look at a stranger and build a whole picture of them without even thinking. We wanted to make that conscious, and turn it around: to put the audience on stage.”
Corinne Maier
Magic Garden — creator
Made by Magic Garden
“Who are you?” was created by Magic Garden — a Swiss-German theatrical laboratory that works between performance and social research. Their instruments are perception, memory, projection and imagination: the quiet machinery of how we read another human being. It was conceived by Tina Müller and Corinne Maier.
It grew out of an earlier Magic Garden piece about diagnosis — the power of the labels, medical and psychological, that others place on us. Everything the show does descends from one everyday act: the way we read a stranger.
Tina Müller
Idea & concept
Corinne Maier
Idea & concept
Hear the creators
“We're so happy it can travel — even without us. That's the beauty of this show: it can have a life of its own.”
Tina Müller
Magic Garden — creator
The idea is older than us
In 1997 the psychologist Arthur Aron showed that thirty-six escalating questions could make two strangers fall in love. We took the premise and turned it inside out: a hundred questions, and not a single word spoken.You don't ask them of each other — the questions arrive in sealed envelopes, and you answer them in writing, in silence, watching the person across from you. Only afterwards do you finally talk.
What you take home
Four envelopes open, one after another — from the ordinary to the things we never ask. At the end, a single sealed answer about you, written by the stranger opposite, is yours to keep. Most people leave having been seen more honestly in seventy minutes than in years of talking.
“It's really about you — your prejudice, the way you think. If you look at yourself precisely during the show, you can learn a lot about yourself.”
Corinne Maier
Magic Garden — creator