Archives: Echoraum

Marlon, you are a poet, musician and visual artist. As part of this year’s asphalt Festival, you are moving into the Weltkunstzimmer, where you will live and work in an open studio. Festival visitors will be able to visit you on a total of seven days. How did the idea for this project come about?
Ideas often just float around in the air. Artists stumble upon a book or an idea by chance, and then an impulse and the right circumstances come along. Opportunities. After moving into a new studio and with my constant ability to use and fill spaces, I had this desire and idea somewhere in the back of my mind to reveal my use of space – whether it works or not. At certain stages, I always had people in my studios, artists or not, and it was precisely the unfinished work situations that seemed to be the most exciting. I was often asked where I got my texts from, where the thoughts took shape. Often I couldn’t even describe it. Of course, they suddenly take shape, a sentence is picked up or shoots out through constant thinking. Then, however, a combination of knowledge, practice and inspiration happens in many ways. Creating a catalogue from which to draw is important to me in every way. The creation of such a catalogue, for example through a new studio, different energies and new input, is the moment I want to show. Recently, new ideas have also emerged that I would like to expose to a change of location.

Most artists prefer to work away from the public eye and only show their work when it is finished. What appeals to you about letting people participate in the creative process?
I can imagine that some people might be interested in that. In addition, I am currently experiencing for myself while working how some sketches, of whatever kind, simply spark something, create a wave, set something in motion. That creates a moment of tension. I have no fear, no shame, in showing my mistakes, my stumbles, my detours, my explorations and my hits from the subconscious. Either way, poetry, and for me art as well, and thus life, embodies the truth of error.

The Weltkunstzimmer also aims to produce texts inspired by conversations with guests. Is this way of working new to you?
No, my writing happens mainly through contact with the world. However, concentrating it in this way or activating it in a performative exhibition has not happened very often.

How important is it to you in general to interact with viewers, listeners and readers, i.e. those who consume your work?
Extremely important, if it’s an exchange. Just listening to myself is not enough for me. I am fundamentally a communicative person, both actively and passively. I need feedback. That’s where I find answers and questions.

What projects are you currently working on?
First of all, the DJOundBO collective, more on that in a moment. Then there’s the band Botticelli Baby, with whom I’ll be touring a lot. On these trips through Europe, I experience a lot that I incorporate into my art. The exhilaration on stage and the many people I meet inspire me. At the end of the year, I’ll be spending some time in the studio recording a few new songs. Poetry runs through everything I do, and I want to explore some new approaches to text and writing at the asphalt Festival. My solo music project, The Puffins, is also maturing and will continue to grow.

You studied philosophy and history at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Since 2015, you have been a student at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. You have realised numerous exhibitions and performances, written a book and played concerts across Europe with your band Botticelli Baby. One could get the impression that you are creative around the clock. Is that possible?
Yes, it is. It works well until I collapse. What is creativity, I ask myself here, and return to the question? At some point, I came to the realisation that I cannot stop collecting, perceiving and absorbing things, impressions and people, and allowing myself to be moved by them. I couldn’t end my life. Being inspired and inspiring others leads to both my actual artistic work and my everyday life. Drinking coffee in the morning, taking a few notes, recording a dream, reading a few poems or listening to music are just as much a part of my work as concentrated hours at my workplace in the studio or on the street. So it’s always a game of input and output. It’s always life, my work and my life.

You already mentioned it briefly: this year, you have teamed up with artist Josefine Henning to form the art collective “DJOundBO – TRÄNEN, SEX und ALKOHOL” (TEARS, SEX and ALCOHOL). What can we expect from the two of you?
We will be focusing specifically on duo performances. For example, what can tenderness be in an artist relationship? Or the observation of the other in their respective existence? There will be a poetry book with linocuts and poetry drawings, which already has 120 pages at the moment. By the way, we are still looking for a publisher! Linocuts, Polaroid photography, mobile installations and exhibition concepts for the whole year. Several exhibitions are in the planning stage, which may deal with room-in-room concepts and performance memories, remnants and live performances, and the creation of one’s own spaces. Painting, drawing and notebook art are always the lifeblood of the whole. Stickers, reading booklets and smaller works also flow into it. In all this setting off, on the way or even detours – the latter being particularly important – all mistakes are allowed. Life is the life of artists, in this case.

Opening reception on Friday, 1 July, 6 p.m. at Weltkunstzimmer. Bösherz’s open studio will then be open daily from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. until Saturday, 9 July. Admission is free.

The interview first appeared on Alexandra Wehrmann’s Düsseldorf blog theycallitkleinparis. Wehrmann works as a journalist for various media outlets and, since 2015, has been writing about people who contribute to urban life in whatever way they can on her blog. In 2021, she published her book Oberbilk. Hinterm Bahnhof (Oberbilk. Behind the Station), which she co-authored with photographer Markus Luigs.

Following ›Schwarz-helle Nacht‹ (2019), ›Aktion:Aktion!‹ (2020), and ›Im Trial‹ (2021), ›Endstation fern von hier‹ concludes our ›Historification› cycle, in which we theatrically reappraised events of the National Socialist era in Düsseldorf. It concludes with a major challenge: How do you create documentary theater without documents?

The sources and accounts of contemporary witnesses for the previous projects were extensive, moving, and numerous. This enabled us to develop our plays responsibly and purposefully, using these documents. When it came to the topic of forced labor, the situation presented itself differently. Few eyewitness accounts were found in the archives and memorial sites, and those that were found tended to be very reserved in their assessment of their own fate. It was as if people weren’t allowed to denounce their own injustice. As if those affected, knowing the suffering of others, were relativizing their own. This raised the question for us as a collective: Why has the memory of the forced laborers of the Nazi regime never found its place in our culture of remembrance? And what needs to be remembered in this context?

Retrospective: Forced Labor in Düsseldorf and Germany

1941 – German soldiers march into the Soviet Union, besiege and plunder whatever they find, and conscript people – especially young people – into forced labor. “In the sequence of the attacks, the affected civilian population was first recruited, and when this didn’t elicit sufficient response, they were forced into forced labor in the German Reich,” says Joachim Schröder from the Alter Schlachthof memorial site. Together with Rafael R. Leissa, he has published a comprehensive study on the subject of forced labor in Düsseldorf and supported us with his knowledge during our work.

People came to Germany from all over Europe: “The fascist state consisted to a very large extent of forced labor. Many people were at the front or had already fallen. Without forced labor, Germany would have been impossible to organize,” Schröder continued.

For the companies, it was an economic consideration. To continue business, they needed employees, and they were no longer available through other means. “I am not aware of any cases in which a company refused to employ people simply because they were forced.”

People primarily came to Düsseldorf from Ukraine, as the recruitment districts were allocated accordingly. In this context, the former Gau capital is one city among many. The exact number of forced laborers is difficult to determine because the entire German economy was subject to some form of forced labor. Even German workers could not simply work wherever they wanted. In Düsseldorf, there were approximately 300 accommodations spread throughout the city, but not all of those affected lived in camps. Some also lived directly in the companies or in family homes. However, one can assume that the people were so numerous that they could not have remained hidden from anyone as part of the cityscape.

Racism and Continuity

“What is particularly striking when examining forced labor during the Nazi era is the continuity with which foreigners in Germany are viewed. The comparison with the so-called ‘guest workers’ of the 1950s and 1960s, for example, is obvious. They lived in ‘foreign workers’ camps,’ meaning they were also housed in barracks, were expected to keep to themselves, had significantly fewer rights, and had to do work that no one wanted to do, all while being paid less for it,” said Schröder.

And even today, precarious employment conditions for foreign workers continue to make headlines. The National Socialist regime established a hierarchy of nationalities, some of which persists to this day. According to its logic, people from Western countries (the Netherlands, for example) are also Germanic and thus ‘racially more valuable’ than, for example, people of Italian descent, who ranked below them in the hierarchy. The Slavic nations were classified under this category – they were considered working peoples and Bolshevik subhumans – and from the National Socialist perspective, the Jews, Sinti and Roma were the targets. “The whole thing was accompanied by typical Nazi bureaucracy – laws, even. People were deprived of their freedom, discriminated against, disenfranchised, and treated in a racist manner, and this was then couched in laws and regulations so that it somehow appeared legal,” Schröder reports as one of the results of his extensive research.

In total, more than 20 million people from across Europe suffered harm in the Third Reich, of which 13.5 million were foreign forced laborers, five million of whom came as Soviet prisoners. In total, more than 20 million people from across Europe suffered losses in the Third Reich, of which 13.5 million were foreign forced laborers, five million of whom came as Soviet so-called “Eastern Workers” (Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians). They were on average 18 years old. Children were also used for labor. The former forced laborers had to wait for many years for compensation. It was not until 2000 that the “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” Foundation was established and made compensation payments to those affected (from a total of ten billion DM, funded by payments from the federal government and the companies that benefited at the time). Civilian workers received 5,000 DM, concentration camp prisoners and ghetto internees 15,000 DM. Prisoners of war received nothing, as the law at the time permitted their use for forced labor. “The money certainly did something for people in the East.” At the same time, the sum is disproportionate to what was done to them,” Schröder states.

Who gives whom their voice? Who provides the impetus to take a closer look at other corners of historical reappraisal? And why are more than 20 million voices missing from our canon of memory? We, the theater collective Pièrre.Vers, have taken up the subtle impulses we encountered during our research, amplified them, and, above all, channeled them into one character: Valentina, whose story is one of these 20 million. She represents all the people whose stories have remained unheard to this day.

When you look at your work, you seem like a “system breaker” who transcends disciplines and genres. Basically, you no longer adhere to traditional categories or genres. How would you define what you do on stage?

I am interested in topics and finding ways to implement them. I don’t care what the genre is called. The important issues of the present will not be solved by pigeonholing them.

Your productions reveal a great fascination with the body. On stage, you also show the non-normative, which is not yet a matter of course in mainstream media or the world of advertising, for example. Which bodies interest you?

All of them.

You work a lot with people who are not professional dancers. How does the process of creating a new piece work for you?

Similar to working with professionally trained dancers. When you work professionally, the distinction between amateur and professional is obsolete.

Your works often form larger arcs and you produce series that are connected in terms of content and aesthetics. Where do you draw your themes and artistic inspiration from?

A good question has no end and often leads to follow-up questions. That’s why series and remixes often emerge.

In your choreography ‘Habitat,’ 120 naked bodies were on display, and in ‘Gootopia,’ the performers are also naked. What concept are you pursuing with this?

Habitat is very much about working with the naked body beyond ideologies and images that are socially prevalent as stereotypes. In Gootopia, slime becomes a second skin, which simply makes being naked more sensible. Otherwise, we would have to constantly wash our clothes.

In Gootopia, six performers interact with slime. Why this substance?

Slime has gotten a bad rap during the pandemic. Even in our tech-driven world, slime has no place – sterility is important. Humans are actually slimy creatures – we come into the world naked and covered in slime. I wanted to see slime as a co-performer in Gootopia and explore our relationship with it. Slime is essential for many living things. I find its connecting function particularly exciting, as well as the fact that it liquefies and softens bodily boundaries.

Different types and forms of slime are used in the play. How did you go about developing the play until you found the right “states of aggregation”? Did you experiment a lot, and were there any failed attempts?

Juliette Collas and Philomena Theuretzbacher, who produce the mucus, did a lot of research and also tried it out at home in their private kitchens. In the rehearsal room, we experimented a lot, showered a lot, laughed a lot, and shivered a lot because of the cold mucus on our skin. We tried to produce slimes that drip differently, stick to the body and also don’t, create connecting streaks, and are edible. There were also detours in the discovery process, but each detour helped us in some way or surprised us. It was important to us to produce slime that is biodegradable and skin-friendly.

As a European choreographer who works not only in German-speaking countries, how do you experience the current development that, since Corona, parts of the audience have stayed away from the theatre? How do you personally view the current theatre and its future, what function do you attribute to it in society?

Theatre will always exist. I think it’s a wave motion – there are times when fewer people go to the theatre, then more again. You have to be patient – they’ll come back, or others will come, as long as there are good productions. What the pandemic has made very clear to me is that live experiences cannot simply be replaced by digital formats.

What’s next for you?

After lots of touring in the spring and early summer, I’m looking forward to a summer break from mid/late July. My next project, called “SONNE”, will premiere in April 2023. I’ve had the idea in my head for years – the sun performs on stage and looks at Earth and our ecological crisis from a non-human perspective.

Your production SCORES THAT SHAPED OUR FRIENDSHIP was invited to the 2021 Berlin Theatre Meeting, and in 2020 you were awarded the German Theatre Prize DER FAUST in the category Best Performer: Dance. Do you see yourself as a dancer or a performer?

I see myself as a dancer, among other things. Basically, I am an artist who uses different forms of expression.

You are now firmly established in the theatre world and are a member of the Munich Kammerspiele ensemble. Has this changed your self-perception as an artist, and to what extent is this space for development interesting to you?

The Munich Kammerspiele is a great school for me. It’s nice to work with different directors and to develop a routine through frequent performances. However, I also love the independent scene very much! For me, it’s more personal.

How would you describe the differences between your artistic, experimental work in the independent scene and that in a municipal cultural institution? Does a municipal theatre like the Münchner Kammerspiele also offer space for experimentation?

I don’t know what it’s like in other municipal theatres. The Kammerspiele is already experimentally oriented. Of course, there isn’t as much room for personal expression, but we are always encouraged to get involved and also to act as co-authors. I think it depends on how much personal commitment you have.

SCORES THAT SHAPED OUR FRIENDSHIP is an ensemble piece by three people from very different genres. How did Paweł Duduś, Kim Twiddle and you develop it together, collectively as an independent theatre production?

Paweł and I started developing the piece. We had a budget for the independent scene. Kim then joined us and we continued to develop the piece together.

SCORES is a very intimate, tender pas de deux. The premiere took place in February 2020, a few days before the first lockdown, and then the coronavirus pandemic spread. Were you able to perform the piece at all after that?

Miraculously, we always managed to avoid the lockdowns and were actually able to perform the piece. However, not in the original version, which was very close to the audience. I hope that we will be able to return to the old format in the future.

What role would you like to play?

I would like to play a man. Or a classical piece. That would be a big contrast to what I’m doing now.

The choreography is based on a dance from the El Ejido Veinte neighborhood in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, on the border between Mexico and the United States. The area is dominated by violence and drug trafficking. Here, young people perform the “Danza del Ejido 20 de Matamoros” on the streets—a dance originally invented by the Spanish to represent the victory of the Christians over the Moors. During the colonization of Latin America, it became a racist propaganda tool designed to highlight the difference between whites and non-whites. The indigenous population was forced to embody the “Moors,” while the Christians represented Spain. Over the centuries, this “conquest dance” evolved into a form of resistance against colonial and later neoliberal forces.

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Here, Amanda Piña writes about her research in the streets of Matamoros for the development of the play Frontera | Border, indigenous roots, narco-poetics, and the political and social power of dance.*

Rodrigo de la Torre, the lead dancer of Danza del Ejido 20 de Matamoros, likes to use computer games as a metaphor to explain how the dance should be performed in the streets of Matamoros:“At the beginning of ‘La Matraca’ (‘machine gun sequence’), you’re like a race car with a full tank. Like in a computer game. During the sequence, the fuel is used up and at the end of the sequence, the tank is completely empty. You have to conserve your energy during the dance: If you exhaust yourself during a sequence, you’ll be dead at the end every time you’ve given your all. That’s why we run after the sequence to refill the tank. After so many tanks have been emptied and refilled, we end up like ‘mariguanos’ (marijuana smokers) without having smoked; the dance is like our drug.”

Rodrigo uses powerful metaphors to describe the dance. It is practiced in a border area where the violence resulting from drug trafficking, militarization, and American media culture is omnipresent on a daily basis. (…) This dance does not take place in a theater, but on the streets and squares, and it is not work in the sense of a “professional” activity. It could be understood as a ‘traditional art form’, but categories such as ‘contemporary’, ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ do not even begin to describe its complexity. In the course of this dance, which is practiced only by male members of the working class, something emerges that lies outside the tradition and the modern or contemporary canon of Western art. (…) In the dance sequence ‘La Matraca’, the visualisation of the rhythm of a firing firearm serves as an example of the construction of a new mestizo physicality. (Note: Mestizo is the term used to describe the descendants of Europeans and the indigenous population of Latin America. It is considered racist and discriminatory. However, as there is no alternative term, it is still used in certain contexts.) It is a form of resistance against a violent border context, the paradox of globalized neoliberal capitalism, in which the circulation of capital and goods meets the stagnation imposed on the bodies of ethnically defined people.

“Something really bad must have happened to these men to make them dance like that.”
– Leonor Maldonado, filmmaker and choreographer

In her book Borderlands / La frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldua writes: “In the ethno-poetics and performance of the shaman, my people, the Indians, did not split the artistic from the functional, the sacred from the secular, art from everyday life. The religious, social, and aesthetic purposes of art were all intertwined.”

I would like to try to connect three things with this: the social, the aesthetic, and the sacred from the perspective of the body in the Danza del Ejido 20 de Matamoros, as it is danced today on the border between Mexico and the United States. I will then outline the central questions raised by the productions Danza y Frontera, which I developed at Tanzquartier Wien in October 2018 in collaboration with the dancers from Matamoros and Nicole Haitzinger, as well as Frontera | Border – A living monument’ commissioned by the Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2020 and the social sculpture ‘Frontera Procesión’. All these pieces were created in connection with the fourth part of the study ‘Endangered Human Movements’.

The social aspect
The men dance the Matamoros dance in their free time, most of them considering it a kind of hobby – a leisure activity outside of their work in the drug cartels or the maquila industry, the two most important economic sectors in the region. Maquila refers to the assembly factories established by multinational companies on the Mexican side of the border with the United States. This is an industry for cheap labor, where the formation of unions is expressly prohibited. Many of the dancers are members or former members of the La Maña cartel. Some prefer to work in the maquila industry, where they earn a wage of about $50 a month in 12-hour shifts. Others have emigrated to the United States in search of better working conditions, as in the case of Rodrigo. Young working-class men often work as sicarios, or contract killers for the cartels, and even if they do not, they are viewed as such by society.

“We dance to be something other than Maña, to be something other than Sicarios.”
– Uriel Soria, known as Koala, drummer, dancer, and member of Rigo’s group

Rehearsals take place in the backyard of Rigo’s house, where the men meet to dance together. The choreography is usually danced in unison, with the drummers also acting as a choir. When the dance is performed on the street, the dancers follow the hand signals of the lead dancer to know which sequence comes next. Socially speaking, the dance is a space of unity, harmony, sign language, and nonverbal communication for a different representation of working-class masculinity in public. The dance could be interpreted as a space of brotherly togetherness. In order to find their own identity, the roles assigned to the young men based on the social context at the border are performed in unison.

Aesthetics
The third influence reflected in dance is Anglo-American media culture. The portrayal of young working-class men in the media, the aesthetics of “cool” in hip-hop culture, and media representations such as Hollywood action films or computer games can all be found in dance. This desire to appear cool is also linked to the aesthetics of Chicanos. Imitating the gringo (white person) means becoming like him, devouring his cultural codes and distancing oneself from the folkloric idea of the ‘Mexican’. Against the backdrop of colonial history, this led to racially defined patterns that are still present in both countries.

“We wanted to dance and look cool in the hood.”
– Uriel Soria

When asked about their costumes, Rigo says, “We wanted to be cool. If we wore the huaraches and feathers of the Matachines dance, we would look ridiculous and the girls would make fun of us. But we still wanted to dance, and we wanted to dance like in the hood, like the bad boys, the dangerous boys we wanted to be. So we went over to the United States to buy Nikes and T-shirts and caps, and we changed the costumes and the dance to make it our own.”

This feeling of coolness can also be seen in the dance moves themselves—close to the ground, as if in hiding. Like thieves or dealers from the neighborhood hiding in the corners of the city. The low-to-the-ground pose is a stance reminiscent of indigenous dance practices, but it also picks up on African American characteristics such as “on the ground beats.” They dance like hip-hop heroes, like gangsters, like mariguanos (marijuana smokers).

The dance could be interpreted as a space for their identification with the racist stereotypes imposed on the “Indians” and “mestizos” by the folkloric representation of the nation, as well as a process of downright cannibalistic appropriation of the characteristics of the Other.

The sacred
In ancient Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the two words for dance, Macehualitztli and Netotilitztli, had different meanings. While Netotiliztli referred to simple dancing, Macehualitztli also meant to do a kind of penance. The word Macehua, the root of Macehualitztli, described a mystical dance. Through dancing, one received the gifts and graces of the deities and sacred beings that populate the world. In addition, the word Macehualli was used to refer to members of a class that stood above slaves and below nobles. Macehualli performed military service, paid taxes, and worked collectively. They could own property, marry free people, have free children, and enjoy relative freedom. They had the right to own a piece of land as long as they cultivated it, which could then be inherited by their children if they worked it in the same way. However, they were not allowed to sell it or give it as collateral for another asset, as they were merely beneficiaries of the land.

This system of land ownership, called calpulli, is the root of the Mexican ejido structure that emerged from the land reform during the Mexican Revolution. It describes a specific form of communal land ownership by peasant communities, in which the members of the community cultivate specific plots of land and maintain communal farms.

Matamoros is a working-class neighborhood built on ejido land. In the movements of the “Danza del Ejido 20 de Matamoros,” we find traces of the sacred and communal functions that dance had in pre-Hispanic, colonial, and modern contexts. Communal organizations that were linked to indigenous social structures before the ejido are now affected by the neoliberal logic of exploitation, racialization, and criminalization.

As forms of resistance, sacrifice and liminality are central aspects of the dance of Matamoros, which, as a processional dance, accompanies social, religious, and mestizo pilgrimage rites to sacred sites that are now associated with Christianity. The continuity of the sacred sites and temples, which were destroyed by the Spanish and later Christianized but remained in the same locations, is well documented. There is also continuity in the dances, which were Christianized but continued to be performed in the same places and on the same pilgrimage routes.

In these processions, the dancers and drummers act as supporters of the members of the community who ask for the gifts of the deity (in this case, Catholic saints) or give thanks for favors already granted. The main deity in this case is a mestizo woman who embodies a creolization of pre-Christian female deities and the historical mother of Jesus, the Virgin of Guadalupe. “We dance for the Virgin of Guadalupe,” says another member of the dance group. “So she will protect us.”

My thesis would be that the sacred aspect of dance could be read as a form of continuity of the physiological (liminal) functions that indigenous dances had in pre-Hispanic and colonial times. These liminal functions are more resilient than the changing ideologies and power structures that dancers have had to express throughout history.

Dances on the border within Fortress Europe
The performances of Danza y Frontera are a collaboration between artists and dancers who do not come from an artistic context or from Europe, in order to create a series that takes into account the complexity and intertwining of identities in a process of disidentification.

This process describes the deconstruction of a model based on dualistic logic, such as the familiar and the foreign, the civilized and the barbaric, the modern and the traditional, the local and the migrant. In the concept of the mestiza as a border subject living in a multi-layered world, there is therefore no place for binary identifications.

As a mestiza living in Vienna and Mexico City, I am confronted with the way I am perceived and identified as Latina, as a migrant in Europe, and as a native in Chile and Mexico (I have both nationalities). These assigned identities are never complete or pure. As an artist and dancer, I am perceived as dark-skinned in Europe, while in Mexico I am perceived as a “güerita,” a pale woman. My identities are multi-layered. It is difficult to fully embody them in contexts where one is expected to be one thing and not many. In this sense, being more than one, being diverse, does not serve the forms of representation that seek to represent and embody a single perspective, for example, representing only one nation state. Being only Mexican or Austrian or Chilean.

Becoming a unity is a Western construction of uniqueness that stands in stark contrast to indigenous forms of fluid and processual identities and relies heavily on the concept of national borders. Those who are more than one, who are in flux, live within and beyond certain constructed boundaries. One is different depending on which side of the border one is on. One is always context-dependent.

The need to cross the border arises from the mere existence of a border; the impulse of people to move existed before the border. In this way, the attempt to domesticate, discipline, and normalize human movement is resisted. The figures of the “migrant” and the “mestizo” are defined by the politics of migration or colonial appropriation. As metaphors, these two figures introduce new models of representing subjectivities beyond binary logic and propose a utopia of heterotopia. The celebration of the diverse identities embodied by border subjects, beyond essentialism, finds expression in Anzaldua’s “new mestiza,” which challenges the heteronormative, patriarchal order.

By Amanda Piña

How do we want to live? And how do we want to die?

Helge Schmidt talks about “Die Krebsmafia” (The Cancer Mafia), the connection between theater and journalism, and which topics are still relevant on stage.

How did you become aware of this topic?

Helge Schmidt: I met with [investigative journalist] Oliver Schröm to talk about the latest developments surrounding Cum-Ex, which we did two plays about. During the “cozy part” of the conversation, Oliver told me about new information from the field of oncology, and I told him about my search for a new topic for a play. And, yes, sometimes it’s that simple—one thing led to another.

What surprised you most during your research?

Helge Schmidt: Definitely the scale of it. The book “Die Krebsmafia” (The Cancer Mafia) begins, to put it bluntly, with tax tricks that we have long since become accustomed to. But then it gets bigger and bigger. Pharmacists are involved, doctors are involved. The demigods in white. Patients die, human lives are put at risk. And for me, that’s the most striking difference from the tax issues I’ve been dealing with recently. The victims of the “cancer mafia” are not abstract. It’s not “the taxpayer” who is being harmed here. It’s Siegmar Bogen, and he’s dead.

Cancer is not a topic that people like to deal with. What are your hopes for this theater evening?

Helge Schmidt: Of course, the evening is about cancer. But the real question is: How can it be that we have not created a system in which patients receive the best medicine and the most caring treatment—but instead a market that refers to sick people as “customers” and turns health into a commodity? It’s about providing down-to-earth information, but “just” that might not be enough. I’m interested in the systemic dimension, not the scandal. That’s what fundamentally distinguishes theater from investigative journalism. We share a time and a space with the audience. And this sharing of space and time is a democratic experience. In that space, we want to negotiate the question: How do we want to live? And also: How do we want to die?

Why do you so often choose the really big issues?

Helge Schmidt: I think that the big social issues I’ve brought to the stage have the potential to bring people from different bubbles into conversation with each other. Whether conservative, liberal, or left-wing, most people reject the idea that the financial interests of individuals should take precedence over the life and death of cancer patients. In our productions, we have found that different milieus are dissatisfied with developments in our society and want to talk about them. And we want to invite them to do so.

In recent years, you have virtually specialized in making journalistic research on complex social issues suitable for the stage. What do you like about it?

Helge Schmidt: I think that both journalism and subsidized theaters are in a state of ongoing fundamental crisis. Journalism is losing attention to digital competition. In response, there has been a reflex to resort to clickbait. The headline dominates the story. The theater lacks a new (younger) and more diverse audience. It has slept through decades of reforms and renewal. Instead of finally tackling these issues, it gets lost in substitute debates to protect the same old privileges. The audience senses this and loses interest once again. I think journalism and theater have something to offer each other. Journalists have topics and texts that interest people. Theaters have forms, aesthetics, and spaces that allow for stories beyond news and “Isn’t that crazy?”

Do you see a connecting element between the plays “Cum-Ex Papers,” “Tax for Free,” and “The Cancer Mafia”?

Helge Schmidt: In all three plays, we try to provide our own small analyses of sections of society: first the economy, then politics, and now healthcare. In addition to connections in terms of content and motifs—they all deal with money, fraud, morality, and greed—the connection for me arises in the audience. We want something from them, and we have something to tell them.

Oliver Schröm was sued for his work—are you worried that the same thing could happen to you?

Helge Schmidt: I hope that theater isn’t relevant enough to generate the kind of attention from lawyers that we wouldn’t otherwise get. But beyond the financial risks of lawsuits, it would of course be interesting to know how courts would protect artistic freedom when dealing with journalistic topics. This is not exactly ordinary art. And fortunately, the people we are dealing with are more likely to be patrons of the arts than opponents of art.

The interview was conducted by dramaturge Franziska Bulban.

These and other questions will be addressed at the international symposium ‘ALL IN 2022 – Theatre Operations and the Performing Arts’ on 24 June 2022 in Düsseldorf. For the fourth time, Un-Label – Performing Arts Company and kubia, the competence centre for cultural education in old age and inclusion, are jointly organising the ALL IN symposium, this time in cooperation with the asphalt Festival and the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus.

Foto: Martina Marini-Misterioso

Jürgen Dusel, Federal Government Commissioner for Matters relating to Disabled Persons, and Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen, Minister for Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, will open the high-profile programme of discussions and workshops. In lectures, excerpts from works, panel discussions and workshops at the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus and the Central am Hauptbahnhof, theatre professionals from Germany and abroad will show which approaches work well, for example, so that actors with and without disabilities can work together on an equal footing. At ALL IN, theatre professionals from the fields of directing, dramaturgy, technology, costume and set design will find inspiration for their own work. The event is also aimed at people who work in cultural organisations, science, cultural administration or cultural policy.

In her keynote speech, British dramaturge Kaite O’Reilly will talk about the potential of equality for actors with disabilities for the aesthetic and structural development of stage production. Rimini Protokoll and the Munich Kammerspiele will show what this can look like in practice, based on the productions ‘Chinchilla Arschloch, waswas’ and “Effingers” – the Tourette’s play ‘Chinchilla Arschloch, waswas’ was performed at last year’s asphalt Festival.

Afterwards, representatives of the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus and inclusion consultants from Access Maker will discuss issues of structural change for theatre operations. Afternoon workshops will focus on alternative dramaturgical approaches and equal forms of collaboration between actors with and without disabilities, costumes and stage designs for diverse bodies, and digital translation processes from movement to sound and sound to images, as well as individual solutions for technical accessibility and the development of live audio descriptions and touch tours.

The entire symposium programme will take place in architecturally accessible rooms. Simultaneous translation into English, German and German Sign Language (DGS) as well as audio description will be provided for the discussion programme, including via live stream. Simultaneous translation into English, German and DGS will be available for the workshops upon prior registration.

In addition, personal assistants will be on hand to provide individual support to participants, and the organisers will provide a shuttle service between the workshop venues for people with limited mobility if required.

The full programme of the symposium can be found at un-label.eu

Helgard Haug Photo Hanna Lippmann

Christof Seeger-Zurmühlen: Tourette’s syndrome and theater—not exactly an obvious combination. How did this play come about? Was the topic of Tourette’s syndrome there from the start, or was there an encounter that inspired you?

Helgard Haug: In this case, it was an encounter. I met Christian Hempel while researching for another play, “brain projects,” in which we explored the brain. From our very first encounter, I was impressed by his incredibly thoughtful way of talking about Tourette’s. And by the self-confidence that shines through. For a long time, he used the phrase “I tick, therefore I am.” He has strong vocal tics. Superficially, you could say that these are the people who shout obscenities or swear in some way. That’s also the case with him, although he is incredibly creative in that regard. But he also has strong motor tics. As a result, he is always exposed and has to constantly explain himself. And that has led him to become very withdrawn in recent years. And I found that exciting in connection with theater and the question of presence, how we tolerate each other and how predictable we are.

When I asked him if he could imagine participating in the play, Christian gave a categorical answer: “No, no way!” But then he came to Hamburg for a rehearsal. That was incredibly exciting. We had to avoid him walking the distance between the parking garage and the theater, which is located directly at the main train station: a street with drug dealers and homeless people… His Tourette’s reflects what it sees, absorbs it, thematizes it, twists it, comments on it loudly. It should not be understood as a judgmental comment, but it very quickly finds out what is not acceptable, what should not be said – the taboos. And then it shouts them out loud. And in some situations, there is no time for explanations – which is why every encounter carries the risk of misunderstanding.

I then asked him if we could take a trip through Germany. So what does Tourette’s do when you’re at a church, at a highway rest stop, at a campaign event, at the seaside? What happens there? This idea was given the working title “Germany Trip.” I thought: Let Tourette’s comment on Germany. And that’s what we did. We traveled to Berlin and met the politician Bijan Kaffenberger, who also plays a role in the play and who has moved in the opposite direction. He puts himself at the center and says very strongly: I am in the public eye and Tourette’s also distinguishes me, makes me unique, so he turns the tables. This trip and the encounters and experiences it involved became a radio play. I was fascinated by how creative Tourette’s can be, how witty and humorous.

And after the very positive experiences of working on the radio play – during which we also explored how Christian is portrayed – he agreed to try out performing on stage. “Maybe it’ll only be five minutes,” we kept saying to reassure him. And so we ventured forward together, step by step.

Then I invited Bijan to join us – who at first wasn’t sure if he could really take the time he needed. And in Frankfurt, we met Benjamin Jürgens. He leads a self-help group, has a completely different form of Tourette’s and deals with it in a different way. This gave rise to the idea of working with these three men on three modules and keeping everything as open as possible so that we could still perform the play even if one of them didn’t want to or couldn’t or if the tics were simply too strong.

It was clear that Barbara Morgenstern would do the music. And then it became increasingly clear that she would also perform, that she could be the one to react on stage if something happened. And that we would invent rules that would allow us to maintain this openness.

We also talk about the offer to Christian, the initial rejection, and the decision to perform after all in the play. Because it’s so important to ask: What does it actually take to get to the point where Christian drives his bus onto the stage, or rides a bike, or whatever the circumstances may be? How long is the journey to get there? And how naturally do we open the door and stand on a stage? And what actually needs to be considered so that Christian can do that at all? Without him hurting himself or others, or breaking anything, or causing irritation or mental injury, so to speak?

Christof Seeger-Zurmühlen: Is it a different evening every time?

Helgard Haug: Yes, but less radically than I initially thought. There were so many considerations and preparations involved in how to deal with it. And ultimately, it became clear during rehearsals that specifications are important: the more fixed and clear the structure, the better the protagonists were able to deal with it during rehearsals. And at a certain point, this became a very strong requirement. Repeatability was then easier than openness, so to speak. Improvising or trying something out is fraught with anxiety. And yet – in between, of course, there is this Tourette’s syndrome that does what it wants. So yes: every evening is different. It’s a play in which every evening really has its own character.

Christof Seeger-Zurmühlen: How long did the process take until a play actually emerged?

Helgard Haug: From the first meeting to the premiere: two years. But the rehearsals were quite short, lasting only three weeks.

Christof Seeger-Zurmühlen: And do the actors still ask themselves the question: “I don’t know yet if I’ll do it today?”

Helgard Haug: No, now of course everyone wants to be on stage! That’s the exhilarating thing about theater, that it makes everything possible. The big realization is: It works! I think they really enjoy performing it, and it’s fun. The work was also extremely cheerful. There were so many funny moments and a great lightness in developing the play. We all took a lot from that.

Christof Seeger-Zurmühlen: Humor is the great quality of the production. It’s beautiful. I have the impression that a certain relief also arises in the storytelling. What experiences have you had with the audience?

Helgard Haug: Well, the premise of the play is communicated in advance, but nevertheless, you can feel the tension and uncertainty of the audience at the beginning: What is our relationship here? Am I allowed to laugh? And then, at some point, a pact is made, and from then on, it really takes off, because the rules of the game have been clarified. And then, of course, you can play all the chords.

Christof Seeger-Zurmühlen: Has there also been a shift in the composition of the audience? Does the play empower other people who have Tourette’s?

Helgard Haug: It’s an open invitation. We always try to make contact with local groups beforehand. It’s also the case that the question of how to enable someone with Tourette’s to come on stage leads on to the question of how to enable someone with Tourette’s or other compulsive disorders to be in the audience. Perhaps we need to rethink this standardized seating arrangement and offer other seating options? We took our cue from relaxed performance rules and offered that as well. In Frankfurt, there were performances where there were definitely six or seven people with Tourette’s. Benjamin makes a lot of animal noises, like whistling and meowing, for example. And somehow I had the feeling that the theater had turned into a forest because the Tourette’s visitors were responding to the tics. A really beautiful concert! You’re used to something different, and I think this total focus and concentrated concentration in the theater is really great. But in this play, it’s different. It starts to proliferate and doesn’t stop at the auditorium.

Christof Seeger-Zurmühlen: The question is, of course, how inclusive is our society?

Helgard Haug: The more you know, the more experience you gain with people who break the norm, the better. When we are outside the safe spaces, Christian usually says, “No offense, it’s Tourette’s!” That’s great. Christian makes this effort, but it really is an effort for him. It’s annoying to have to explain yourself all the time, of course, but I think it’s worth it. That way, both sides can reach out to each other. I think it’s good not to just expect normal people to understand everything on their own. And then somehow it works and the situation turns into something loving and humorous.

Christof Seeger-Zurmühlen: What are the main themes of the production TANZ?

Florentina Holzinger: It’s specifically about romantic ballet and the representation of femininity on stage. I have a relatively large cast of women from different disciplines around me—unlike my previous works, which were mainly duets.

Christof Seeger-Zurmühlen: Are you also addressing the issue of the representation of women on stage?

Florentina Holzinger: I’m really trying to distance myself from the word “woman,” partly because we’ve been somewhat labeled with this “women’s feminism label,” which isn’t a bad thing. But I’m more concerned with the construction of female identity than with just having women on stage. This is often linked to the fact that we approach male-dominated things, such as weightlifting in the production “Apollon.” I’m a bit critical of lumping everything together like that, because we all grew up in a time when such things can exist beyond gender and are even widely accepted in the mainstream. At the moment, I like to express it by saying that we are concerned with the construction of femininity on stage and not with being a woman per se – because what does that even mean?

Christof Seeger-Zurmühlen: Is it about questioning social constructs?

Florentina Holzinger: Yes, exactly. Gender is not necessarily something you are born with, but rather a social construct that forces you into certain patterns or makes you fall into them. Traditional theater is also full of these patterns, and we deal with them on stage. That’s why I like to take on traditional forms such as ballet, because the relationship is so black and white here. I ask myself: even though we live in this day and age and everyone has a very open understanding of gender, how can such art forms still take place on classical stages or in opera houses without being commented on? And that’s why I took on the commentary.

Christof Seeger-Zurmühlen: So the approach is to critically question traditions that have developed over decades, centuries?

Florentina Holzinger: I like to call it “analysis.” I am interested in mechanisms and transparency in general. That’s where my fascination with ballet comes from: that things that don’t normally appear before the viewer’s eyes should be revealed, that they should be truly illuminated. For a dancer, for example, this includes training to achieve her form. Or the training that an athlete does to achieve a certain form. These are all constructs of bodies, and I am drawn to analyzing them and working out certain themes. In ballet in particular, there is always a flirtation with illusion and things like weightlessness and all these concepts. What interested me in TANZ was making transparent what the exercise for that is. But it’s not just about criticism in the sense of viewing it from a negative standpoint, such as how classical ballet has damaged the female body, but that you can still see it as an enjoyable activity. And for me, this is precisely what makes the topic interesting: the dancer’s self-control. It’s a very complex topic, especially in the current discussion. It’s about how you can make decisions for yourself, in terms of your own practice, but also how you want to present your body or how you want to treat it. So who says you can’t discipline your body in this way because it’s not healthy? And let’s take the work on stage: for the outside observer, it’s never really transparent what steps someone has to take to get where they want to be, and whether it was a good or bad experience for that person. It says nothing about the conditions under which the pieces were produced. These are things we like to play with.

Christof Seeger-Zurmühlen: You initially draw inspiration from people from different scenes such as tattooing, piercing, or branding. How does an artistic concept then emerge?

Florentina Holzinger: “Apollon” was a classic example of this. I watched these “sideshows” on Coney Island, where people do things that are meant to shock and are also associated with a lot of pain. It was completely clear to me that there isn’t really much difference between the work of these pain artists and what a classical ballerina does with her body. Not in the sense of glorifying violence, of course, but simply that it’s a certain way of using the body.

Christof Seeger-Zurmühlen: Ultimately, you’re absolutely right. If I’m a competitive athlete, discipline my body, and then run through the desert, do a marathon, or whatever, then I have to focus and concentrate incredibly hard. I assume your artists do that too when they have rings implanted in their bodies and are pulled up by them. I can observe the tension and concentration that goes into this. Do you mean this phenomenon when you talk about discipline and how far you can go with special training? You can demand a lot from your body, more than we sometimes believe?

Florentina Holzinger: Yes, that’s the power of training, or that’s the whole point of training—in the case of ballet, but even of these ‘sideshow’ things. These are certain types of techniques, some of which have actually been developed over centuries, and which you can learn. It’s about getting the body closer to certain things. Sport is most explicit in this regard when you look at an athlete’s training. But I don’t want to go over the limit, I want to push the limit – so that it is also possible to do other things with the body. Suspension training is a bit of a different story, of course, because it’s not something you train physically every day; it’s more of a mental preparation, I’d say.

Christof Seeger-Zurmühlen: A wise person once said: Contact arises at the boundary. Is that where it starts to get interesting for you?

Florentina Holzinger: I’m not entirely sure what exactly this boundary is supposed to be, because it’s not a fixed line. But yes, that’s always been my personal interest, especially in relation to the body of a dancer: How can one be more than just this physical shell? And how can one use dance to become more than just the body? It’s about this “We lead to take it serious to be more than human in a certain way, or to attempt to be more than human” – which is connected to the question of the meaning of life, I suppose. What’s interesting about ‘making art’ is that you can develop your imagination to the point: Yes, there’s more!

Christof Seeger-Zurmühlen: Absolutely. It sounds like you don’t work with technique, but rather look for impulses that come into action through improvisation, impulses that you can’t think of beforehand. Are you a choreographer who develops and stages in the moment?

Florentina Holzinger: I’m definitely a fan of technique. And as a choreographer, I love the formal approach. Even if it might not seem that way to people who see my shows, there’s actually very little improvisation. And I’m very much concerned with composition.

Christof Seeger-Zurmühlen: Something very existential in your work is touch, embracing the other person’s body. So my question at this point: How much have you missed this contact, how much do you miss it at the moment? How exactly do you work? And on the other hand: How much do you miss the contact with the audience, when we talk about contact?

Florentina Holzinger: Basically, I see this Covid break as a certain kind of break. I’ve always had this in my work routine, these extremely socially concentrated periods that alternate with phases of loneliness and withdrawal. But this was a particularly long phase. And the most unsettling thing was not knowing whether this was a break or a permanent state. But this lack of contact often suits me as a work routine anyway. Every now and then, I like to be truly socially undernourished for a certain period so that I can then find it cool to work so intensively with people again. I’ve been back in full rehearsal for a month now, and I have to say, I’ve really enjoyed it, experimenting with other bodies again. That’s the work I do. We come to the studio together; I’ve prepared certain things that I want to try out and that I’ve never tried before myself. And then we experiment and try things out. Things I thought about during my solitude phase are finally taking shape, and I think that’s incredibly cool. Actually, even more important than the shows you do then. I’ve missed that rehearsal phase with other people. And right now, at least here in Austria, rehearsals are going on as usual; we can do anything. That’s why you’re back in your normal work rhythm very quickly, which has always been an exceptional situation. You have certain rules you follow in order to be able to do extraordinary things with other people. And whether it’s with Covid or without, other rules simply come along. It doesn’t make that much of a difference.

Christof Seeger-Zurmühlen: How strongly does the engagement with communities influence your work, or what does the engagement with communities even mean?

Florentina Holzinger: In general, my inspiration really comes from all sorts of artistic disciplines, and my approach is very interdisciplinary. That’s also important to me. And that’s more related to this community question. I always emphasize that what I do isn’t actually community work, because it’s art, and it’s not meant to serve a social purpose. For me, theater or dance work is community-making. Especially when you’re putting on larger productions, you’re also designing communities. And I find that so interesting, as a utopian approach. And it’s definitely important to me in this interdisciplinary approach that I have conversations with a wide variety of people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just stage people, about specific topics that interest me at the time. When I work with other communities, it’s definitely on stage.

Christof Seeger-Zurmühlen: You work with professionals who bring the necessary expertise in their field.

Florentina Holzinger: Especially with regard to the body, you can look much further than just the dance realm. I’m probably much more interested in what people are doing who I haven’t seen much of on stage.

Christof Seeger-Zurmühlen: In culture, classification into genres is an issue. Is it dance or performance, is it spoken theater, or is it this or that? You’re certainly confronted with that day and night. Has anything changed over the years? Has it become a bit more open, are these attributions decreasing, and are you happy that it’s more about the question of art and no longer about attribution? Are there any developments in this area? How would you describe them?

Florentina Holzinger: That was, of course, a bit of a joke about the awards I received last year, those theater awards or even directing awards, because I would never have seen myself as a director. But I think they’re significant in that they’re obviously breaking open these genres and suddenly opening up conversations about the fact that theater can also be part of the genre. I’m not at all interested in differentiating between these genres, nor in fitting myself into such labels. I mean, it’s probably just because it’s so vintage that I like to associate myself with dance. I suppose it’s because dance is always connected to physical skill and I like to be playful with that. And because, of course, for me the body is dominant in my work, in contrast to text or things like that; the body is simply my main medium. But that doesn’t mean that the dancers can’t have a voice too.

A wheel, a few grains, and water. Is that all a hamster’s thoughts revolve around as it runs around in its cage? Or is it actually dreaming of its escape, of life beyond the bars and unknown adventures? What would we read in its diary? In a musical theater piece, actress Anke Retzlaff and multi-instrumentalist Peter Florian Berndt give a little hamster a voice and body.

To accompany the production, the production will set up mobile phone booths at various locations throughout the city where passersby can leave personal stories, thoughts, and feelings on the topic of freedom. A conversation with Anke Retzlaff, Peter Florian Berndt, and Paul Jumin Hoffmann about their production “What’s Worth Fighting For,” which will premiere at asphalt 2022.

You will be working with the graphic novel “The Diary of Edward the Hamster 1990-1990” by siblings Miriam and Ezra Elia as the textual basis. How did this come about?

Anke Retzlaff: We came across the text by chance, a few years ago. It was on a friend’s shelf and immediately captivated us. Since then, we’ve always dreamed of creating something of our own with it and, over time, have written several songs for the little hamster.

You already worked with audio recordings of dreams last year with your production “Dream Machine” for the “Theater der Welt” festival. Why this approach?

Peter Florian Berndt: It’s an attempt to enliven the theater evening with real voices, both through their content and their very different sonic textures. Furthermore, the voices, thoughts, and participation of the people who connect with our piece in this way are a valuable source of inspiration for the development. There is no warmer and more interesting instrument than the voice.

Anke Retzlaff: That’s true. I love working with people’s voices. I’m interested in what the people around me have to say about the themes of the pieces, what their thoughts and feelings are, and I’d like to incorporate them into our projects. For ‘Dream Machine,’ we collected dreams and incorporated them. The idea was to connect people in an associative space through their fears and desires, without them physically meeting.

What question or theme are the audio recordings for “Diary of a Hamster” addressing?

Anke Retzlaff: Given global tensions and crises, we are particularly interested in what is currently personally occupying the people of our city. How they perceive their world and deal with current fears, desires, and thoughts. These can be both small and large thoughts and feelings. For example, how one might record them in a diary. In our imagination, we are all a bit like Edward the Hamster, in our very own hamster wheels and perhaps also cages. We would like to learn more about these various hamster wheels and cages.

You also want to work with instruments. Would you describe this production more as a concert, a reading, or a play?

Paul Jumin Hoffmann: All three terms apply. The only thing missing is the participation of the visitors through the collection station in the city.

The premiere of “Diary of a Hamster” will take place on the lake stage of the asphalt Festival. There, the audience will hear the music and voices very closely and directly through headphones. What do you expect from this special performance?

Peter Florian Berndt: I imagine it will captivate the audience because it will be very immediate. The songs, the conversations, the voices will be like their own thoughts. Essentially, this directness is a very manipulative approach, but the audience should not be underestimated: Today’s reception habits allow us to create an intense and stimulating evening in this way without overwhelming the audience with technology.

Is the production primarily for children and young people?

Anke Retzlaff: We are developing the production for both young and old people. I believe that some of the thoughts and feelings that Edward experiences in his hamster wheel will recur and move us at different times in our lives in very different forms. Just like the attempt to express ourselves, be it for ourselves in a kind of diary, through art, music, or in direct contact and exchange with others. Perhaps our little hamster will succeed in connecting the thoughts and feelings of people from different generations in the city and turning them into allies.

Paul Jumin Hoffmann: I think adults, children, and young people alike will be able to identify with Edward the Hamster. Back then, I often felt restricted and lonely at school, and later in my professional life, I realized far too late how long I’d been stuck in the comfortable hamster wheel. Feelings of isolation and loneliness are no stranger to anyone during the pandemic, with the younger generation particularly affected. Edward’s strategy for breaking out of this is to find allies in his fight.

You’re part of this year’s asphalt Festival with your collective “should-I-know.” Who is behind the name? And what are the backgrounds of the individual members?

Cornelius Schaper: We, Tümay Kılınçel and I, are should-I-know. We began our collaboration in Düsseldorf in 2013.

Tümay Kılınçel: Since then, in addition to our own artistic work, we have enjoyed working together as a duo.

Cornelius Schaper: I mainly work with video and performance. On the one hand, I create video installations, and on the other hand, I participate in various roles in performative works.

Tümay Kılınçel: I studied contemporary dance, context choreography, and performance in Berlin and Giessen. Since then, I have been doing various work on and offstage.

Cornelius Schaper: Of course, as should-I-know, we don’t do everything alone and have a network that supports us, without which most of our work would not be possible.



As part of the festival, you’ll be presenting your project kaleiDANCEscope on July 7, 8, and 9. It’s a dance wish machine. How exactly does it work?



Tümay Kılınçel: The dance request machine works similarly to a jukebox. The audience can choose a dance, which is then presented. What’s special about it is that it’s a one-on-one dance performance, meaning one dancer dances for one audience member.

Cornelius Schaper: At the same time, the dance request machine is an archive that is intended to grow continuously. Starting with the asphalt Festival, the kaleiDANCEscope begins collecting and archiving dances. The stage design and the performance venue are also special.

How did you select the dances available for selection? And how many are there?

Cornelius Schaper: At each venue, we invite new regional dancers to perform their dance repertoire for us. At the same time, there is also a permanent kaleiDANCEscope ensemble that always travels with the repertoire.

Tümay Kılınçel: The guest dancers and the dance ensemble also exchange their dances with each other. This way, something new is always emerging.

Ahead of the asphalt Festival, you visited local dance groups to discover special dances that are being performed in Düsseldorf. What did you discover during your research?


Cornelius Schaper: Düsseldorf offers many different dance forms: from Anatolian dance clubs to vogueing, hip-hop, contemporary dance, and even carnival clubs. There’s also something called Rhenish folk dance, although we couldn’t find anyone who still dances it. It was still nice to get to know everyone, as it gave us a better understanding of the Düsseldorf dance scene, especially beyond the big stages.

Tümay Kılınçel: The dancers now represented in the kaleiDANCEscope are a sample of the Düsseldorf scene. At the same time, they are the beginning of our growing archive of dances that kaleiDANCEscope is collecting along its journey.

Most artists want to reach as many viewers as possible with their work. Why did you choose a one-on-one performance? What appeals to you about it?

Cornelius Schaper: In a one-on-one performance, you’re closer to the action than on a large stage, where you sit far away from the action. This allows the audience to feel the dance performance more fully. It’s also a question of focus, because there’s no neighbor to distract you; you’re completely focused on the dancer.
 
Tümay Kılınçel: There may be fewer spectators, but the individual intensity means it reaches people more directly. It’s similar to a library, where you often deal with a subject alone, and it’s precisely through this isolation that a special concentration can develop.

The dances aren’t presented directly in public space, but on a miniature stage. How should we imagine it?

Tümay Kılınçel: The stage is a caravan and a sensory experience space. The audience should form their own impression and experience the space, which is why we don’t reveal too much in advance.

Cornelius Schaper: At the same time, we want to explore what it’s like to step out of public space into a kind of parallel world.

You’re performing at three different locations in Düsseldorf’s urban area. How did you choose them? What kind of audience do you want to appeal to?

Tümay Kılınçel: We’ve always wanted to be part of a market; you can choose and buy something here, too, namely dances for the price of a coffee. We’re also excited about the audiences that attend these venues. We believe they’re very diverse. After all, we’re playing at two weekly markets and a flea market.

Cornelius Schaper: At the same time, there will of course also be people who come to us specifically. But we actually want to address passersby and offer them something they wouldn’t have expected in this place.

In the environment you’ve already described, you’ll probably meet mostly people who have had little contact with this kind of culture. How do you try to keep the barriers low, especially in a one-on-one situation where, as a guest, you can’t hide in a group?

Cornelius Schaper: On average, a visit to kaleiDANCEscope lasts about three minutes, sometimes shorter, sometimes longer. A period of time that’s definitely worth investing in trying something new. And there’s a reception outside and people who are approachable.

Tümay Kılınçel: You can also linger outside and listen to, for example, the DJ set that was created especially for the festival. It takes courage to go into the caravan, but it’s worth it.

– – –

July 7, 13:00-18:00: Wochenmarkt Eller, Gertrudisplatz
July 8, 13:00-18:00: Rheinischer Bauernmarkt Unterbilk, Friedensplätzchen
July 9, 12:00-17:00: Trödelmarkt Aachener Platz, Ulenbergstr. 10

There are no advance tickets available for the ›kaleiDANCEscope‹ performances; admission on site costs €2.

– – –
This interview first appeared on Alexandra Wehrmann’s Düsseldorf blog theycallitkleinparis. Wehrmann works as a journalist for various media outlets and has been reporting on people who contribute to urban life in one way or another in her blog since 2015. Her book ›Oberbilk. Hinterm Bahnhof‹, which she published together with photographer Markus Luigs, was published in 2021.

When Iranian-Dutch writer Kader Abdolah first mentioned to another Iranian immigrant that he wanted to become a writer in the Netherlands, his fellow countryman told him, “Your dream is big, but this country is small.” A Nigerian would have told him, “Cut your coat from your cloth.”

One of the most common narratives told by immigrants—especially when their journey takes them from the Global South to the Global North—is that of abandoned dreams and abandoned lives. People who must leave their former lives as architects, bankers, doctors, engineers, and teachers to start anew in a new country as cleaners, laborers, and caregivers. People who sometimes have to abandon their old identities for a new opportunity; people who provide stories for immigration officials, who exchange a marriage of love for one of convenience. People who know what it means to change dreams, to contain dreams, and sometimes to abandon them. And if they’re lucky and persistent, they’ll one day manage to revive those dreams. But the problem with resurrection is that everything that’s resurrected is likely to change its form.
 
For the Star Boys, a West African performance collective based in Antwerp, Belgium, the dream of playing professional football in Europe was revived through an unusual form: theater. The Star Boy Collective grew out of a project by Sri Lankan-Australian theater maker Ahilan Ratnamohan. In 2013, he wanted to develop a dance theater piece with African footballers living in Belgium that would address the phenomenon of human trafficking in football. In exchange for the promise of food and 30 euros per session (three hours of rehearsal), Ahil recruited his first actors. Eleven auditioned, eight made it through, and went on to appear on stage in what would become the successful play “Michael Essien: I Want to Play as You.” In the following years, a total of twelve performed in performances in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The cast rotates, much like a football team, reflecting their precarious situation, where court proceedings, deportations, or signed employment contracts mean Ahil can’t rely on a performer being on stage until he actually sees them there that evening.

Of the fifteen footballers Ahil worked with, three were deported, and one made it from a third-division team in Portugal to a highly paid contract with one of the top clubs in Angola. The rest live a life between dreams, hopes, and reality. I met Etuwe Bright Junior, Lateef Babatunde, and Aloys Kwaakum, three of the Star Boys who stayed in Belgium. Their reality is more impressive than even they could have dared to expect under the circumstances.

Junior, born in 1988 and raised in Festac Town, a middle-class neighborhood in Lagos, Nigeria, wanted to become a professional footballer since 10th grade. Not only was he a talented player, but he also had three brothers who were successful professional footballers for clubs in Europe. His parents – his father a farmer, his mother a shopkeeper – would have preferred him to pursue a different career path, but nothing could dissuade Junior from his ambitious dream.

At 18, he was scouted by an agent and brought to Belgium. This agent was looking for a player who could immediately secure a professional contract. He was all the more disappointed that the club he wanted to sell Junior to didn’t want to put him directly into the first team. “They wanted to sign me as a reserve player for six months. My agent didn’t agree.” One month and three weeks later, Junior was back in Lagos.

Junior speaks very softly, and he’s as particular about dates as he is about his carefully trimmed beard. There are no inaccuracies with him. But when recounting events, he’s not quite as detailed. I wonder if he learned this out of necessity. Belgians demand accuracy, even in casual conversations. Junior went through the entire process of becoming “legal” and faced officials who demand precise dates and a high degree of accuracy. At the same time, he had learned from conversations with journalists and other Africans that one must be careful about revealing too much information.

Junior spent a year and nine months in Lagos before returning to Europe via Italy with another agent. The new agent had a reputation for signing all his talents. However, as Junior discovered much later, he was outmaneuvered by another agent who brought in players from Africa for ten times the price. This agent always negotiated directly with the team presidents and didn’t work with other officials. Junior had the option of signing with a team in Italy’s third division and enrolling as a student to ease the bureaucratic hassle, but Junior had no interest in school. And if he didn’t succeed as promised, there was no incentive to stay. “Plus, after two months away, I missed my girlfriend. I wanted to go back,” he adds with a broad grin.

In 2009, Junior was brought to Finland by a Nigerian agent to play for a team that guaranteed him a 70 percent chance of signing a contract. But after two weeks, the same agent called and told him to lie to the club, saying he had to go “to Africa” unexpectedly, but in reality he should go to Belgium, where his European counterpart would let him sign with a better team. “You’re way too big for Finland,” he told Junior. Junior followed his advice. He was put up in a nice hotel in Charleroi, but in the two weeks he spent there, he was only taken to train with an U13 team once. He doesn’t know what went wrong, but he never heard from either his Nigerian agent or his Belgian counterpart again. Junior left the hotel and moved in with a friend in Antwerp, trying to find a team on his own.



The team he eventually found wasn’t the one he’d dreamed of, but one that gave him respect and recognition after his earlier disappointments. A team made up of African footballers attracted by the prospect of success in Europe and motivated by the success of their compatriots playing in the top divisions in various European countries—but who, for various reasons, hadn’t been able to achieve the same level of success. The team trained together every morning, and if they were lucky, some of them were selected for a “café football team”—the Belgian term for amateur teams that don’t play league football. Café football teams are made up of middle-aged Belgian men who play primarily for the camaraderie. The teams are usually supported by small businesses, and it’s not uncommon for the teams to hire two or three significantly better players to raise the standard of play. These players are invariably Africans who could have turned professional—if not abroad, then in their own country. “You dream of becoming a professional and end up in the 12th division,” says Junior.

Junior is now a legal Belgian citizen, but achieving this status wasn’t easy. He was in a relationship with a Nigerian-Ghanaian woman with Belgian nationality, whom he could have married to ease his path to citizenship. Unable to cope with his dependence on her and knowing it wasn’t “right,” Junior separated from her. However, to stay in Belgium, he had to prove he was a productive member of society by reporting to the city authorities every month and demonstrating that he had completed the required work hours.

Given that it’s difficult for a Black foreigner with rudimentary language skills to find work, this was quite a challenge, says Junior. Since 2015, he has been the proud holder of a Belgian identity card. That same year, he toured with the Star Boy Collective to perform in London—a privilege previously denied to him. Determined to succeed in Belgium, he took Dutch lessons (“It’s not easy to stay here and not be able to work, just because of the ‘registration’. You can’t even go to school!”). He tried to balance his dreams of becoming a professional footballer, a successful actor, and his work at a DHL factory: “I’d like to do theater, but society doesn’t give us the opportunity.”

When Junior first met Ahil, he mistrusted him because he looked like a journalist. “You learn not to trust anyone here.” But the promise of paid work as an actor was too great to turn down: “It was the only ‘black’ job I could do.” So he gave Ahil a chance and discovered, to his own surprise, how much he enjoyed acting. When Junior talks about Ahil and acting and his love for it, the dullness in his voice disappears. His eyes take on an almost feverish shine.

When he talks about misjudging Ahil (“I thought he was trying to make us look stupid in front of the white people with our stories”), he smiles apologetically. “I realized Ahil just wanted our stories to be heard.” And that’s what theater has given him: an opportunity to tell his story firsthand, to dismantle myths and false stereotypes, a chance to be understood. “Because people don’t understand you, they easily judge you. They think you’re lazy, don’t want to work, but you don’t have papers. If you eat three plates at a party, they think you’re greedy, but you don’t have money for food,” says Junior. He gives me his trademark smile again and says, “Theater is our national team.” It helped me find peace within myself and within Europe.”

Junior recently landed a role on television, playing in “Spitsbroers,” a Belgian TV drama about a major football club. He’s very flattered when he’s recognized on the street, but to survive, he still has to visit the job center and hope for work while he waits for his new dream to come true and earn a living.

In the course of the preparations for this piece, we have dealt with conspiracy narratives more than extensively and in the face of an overwhelming number – which can neither be surveyed nor comprehensively comprehended – I really have no choice but to stick my neck out and say: the imagination of the “other side” cannot be surpassed. I couldn’t make it up any better. It’s exciting, fascinating and engaging. Worlds in which everything occurs that people can only dream of, that people can only be afraid of.

Who is the “other side”?

But quite soon after this realization comes the question: How can it be that there are people who actually believe that all these stories are real? Let’s be honest. Lizard people? Children’s blood as an anti-ageing remedy? Donald Trump as a savior? That can only be related to some form of mental deficiency and of course it could never happen to you! Stop. Of course, it has nothing to do with a lack of intelligence and yet it can happen to anyone. The topic is much more complex than it seems and it would go far too far here to go into it in all its facets. Incidentally, this applies not only to this small interjection by the author, but probably also to the theater evening itself.

Anyone who is interested in finding out more, and I would very much welcome this for a variety of reasons, is cordially invited to take a look at the publications by Julia Ebner, Michael Butter, Pia Lamberty and Katharina Nocun*. I have included a bibliography below as well as a reference to where you can turn if you or someone close to you is looking for help. I can only warmly recommend the works and offers of these people. They have – in the spirit of the conspiracy narratives – brought light into the so-called darkness. At least as far as it goes, because at the end of the day, if you are not in the middle of it – and this applies to all areas that are ultimately and finally about faith – you remain on the outside.

So let’s summarize after this short section of text: The fantasy of this evening arose from other people’s ingenuity, the topic is too big to really grasp and the answers to the questions posed are in other people’s books – so what are we actually doing here? What is an evening of theater about conspiracy narratives supposed to bring us that we don’t already think we know? We artists on the one side, you audience on the “other”? And my answer is: we are living democracy. Together with you – our audience. Oh yes? And I’ll tell you why.

Kevin Costner, the Illuminati and chemtrails – a threat to democracy?

The deeper I delved into the world of conspiracy theories, the clearer it became to me that transitions are always fluid. One moment you’re watching a Hollywood film with Kevin Costner and finding the cinematic argument somehow convincing, the next moment the assassination of the American president is being orchestrated by some kind of (usually Jewish) elite that wants to seize world domination. On a quiet evening on the sofa, you enjoy being entertained by Dan Brown’s books, but the very next day, the Illuminati could be putting your own life in danger – just like Tom Hanks’s. One fine sunny day, you drive to a farm because you are looking for your twin brother or simply want to be in nature and close to animals – and bang! – you find yourself sitting at a table with people who believe in poisoning by chemtrails. This list consists of superficially contrived examples, but they could also be true in one way or another. But what they are not is a threat to our democracy. They may be crazy ideas, but people in this country have every right in the world to believe whatever they want, against their better judgement. Even if, firstly, this is difficult to understand, secondly, it limits communication to the point of impossibility, and thirdly – especially for affected relatives – it is almost impossible to accept. However, this only applies as long as there are no plans involved that include, for example, gathering in front of a government building with the intention of initiating a coup. Or something similar.

This kind of balancing act between rejection and acceptance applies not only to our dealings with people who believe in conspiracy theories – who are ‘slipping’ or have ‘slipped’ – but also to our dealings with each other, who live in our democracy and also shape it. I would like to give you an insight into our rehearsals: Over the past few weeks – as always when we work on a play together – we have had a number of discussions on a wide variety of topics. One particularly intense discussion focused on the question: Where is the line? What should be allowed in this country and what should not? On the one hand, people can have and express as many opinions and views as they want. On the other hand, people must not attack democracy. But what exactly constitutes an attack on democracy? And what must we accept as part of it? Everything from the AfD onwards is dangerous, that much is clear, but what about opinions that are conservative or even further to the right (not right-wing extremist) on the political spectrum? How do we deal with them? There were different views. Some said that a good conservative offering is needed. As difficult as it is to bear – from a very left-liberal perspective – people like Friedrich Merz and opinions like those of Friedrich Merz are needed in the public debate. Because these opinions also exist among the population. Because that is precisely what democracy is all about. It’s about representation. Right? Another part of the group vehemently objected. Allowing the opinions of the CDU from the 1980s to resurface is a massive step backwards. There must be limits, and those limits are reached when someone stands up and claims that foreigners are taking our dentist appointments. Firstly, this is wrong; secondly, it is populism; and thirdly, in a civilised, enlightened republic, this should not be an argument for closing the borders again so that we can ‘have our peace’ while people outside our borders are dying. We Germans, in particular, know very well where such exclusionary practices can lead.

The freedom of the civil subject as the lowest common denominator.

I share the despair that it is possible to say such things in this country. And I listen to Mario Voigt – the CDU’s leading candidate for the upcoming 2024 state elections in Thuringia – in his campaign speeches and interviews, and I can hardly bear it. One lie follows another. Exaggerating and in line with his agenda, he misleads people. Or at least incites them. An unbearable way to engage in politics and stir up sentiment. But he is not the leading candidate of the AfD. He unreservedly professes his commitment to democracy. This binds him to the Basic Law, on which our coexistence and our free constitutional order are based. This is not set in stone, and we are certainly still far from truly living up to the ideal that was enshrined there 75 years ago and has been in force throughout the country since 1990. But he and Friedrich Merz are committed to it and can and should therefore be measured by it. So is my stance: in order to avoid the AfD, I would even accept someone like Friedrich Merz? Perhaps it is worth recalling the premises of conservatism in Germany at this point, so as not to forget in all levity that being conservative always means maintaining the status quo and, when in doubt, telling narratives that primarily serve one’s own purposes, always putting one’s own interests before those of others. And in the history of the Federal Republic (conservative forces in the GDR are another story altogether), the status quo naturally also included rejecting the civil rights movement and the women’s movement, whose achievements we still benefit from today. Whose achievements I benefit from. So what does that mean now? I can condemn the way the CDU/CSU and also the FDP, and yes, sometimes even the parties I am more inclined towards, argue on certain issues. Or how they behave in everyday politics, because that is also what it is about now. But in the face of an unprecedented accumulation of crises, classic camp thinking is perhaps outdated. Perhaps it is not the time to divide things into ‘my side’ and ‘the other side’. Perhaps it is rather time to seek common ground, to build community and forge alliances where possible. And where are they possible? As long as my counterpart does not question the freedoms of civil subjects, I can and must talk to them and try to find solutions to our current problems. But if my counterpart’s solutions are to send women back to the kitchen or worse, then no. Conservative and right-wing voices are part of Germany. They are part of reality as soon as you open the newspapers in the morning. They are part of reality in almost every family in this country. They are part of my family.

A new normalisation?

Seeking common ground and forging alliances with the ‘other side’ quickly feels like the normalisation that has been warned against since the Second World War. ‘Nip it in the bud,’ they say. And I want to resist. I want to defend our democracy with all the means at my disposal, because it is only within it that I can think and work the way I do. But who am I defending it against? What is a threat? And what is just silly chatter? And what is both? That is something we have to figure out anew every day. And negotiate. By exchanging views and opinions, not by categorically excluding the ‘other side.’ But maybe that’s just my opinion on how our society should work. I’m writing here like a precocious child, but to be honest, I don’t know exactly how democracy works either.

So: What is democracy?

Let’s be honest. Who knows exactly how our democracy works? And how it should work? And why it is worth protecting. Not that, but why. Shortly before the elections, my social media timelines are full of: ‘Go vote!’ / ‘Vote or be a Nazi.’ / ‘Use your vote before someone else does!’ But when the sun is shining outside and I can spend another hour at the flea market, which only happens once a month, how important is my vote then? Is it really so bad if I don’t cast it? It’s only one vote. And even if I do cast it, it always feels like a very small contribution I’m making to democracy. And it’s abstract, too.

At school, I was taught that democracy is the ultimate wisdom. But what exactly is so wise about it? Well, there are people sitting on this committee (aha, committee, what’s that again?), people forming working groups (ok, working groups, got it), and then there’s the trinity of the separation of powers, et voilà! (Yes, I understood the whole thing reasonably well.) What role do I play as an individual, as me, as a citizen of this state? There are almost 84 million of us, so how important is my opinion? My one vote? And what happens to that vote when I leave it at the flea market, maybe even next to some revealing clothes I’m picking out because I didn’t really understand in social studies class that it’s my responsibility to use that very vote in this country? Because I didn’t understand that it is precisely this vote that enables me to pick out all the revealing clothes in the world at monthly flea markets, because I didn’t understand that I, along with everyone else, am the power in this country. Power comes from the people, and that is me. I am the power. Not alone, but I am part of it.

The keyword is self-efficacy. It’s hard to understand that ‘those up there’ were elected by us, that they are like us and work on our behalf. People don’t magically come into their positions and thereby gain power. We do that. And if we’re not satisfied with them, then we have to vote them out. And if there is no offer that satisfies us, and this fact makes us angry, really angry, then we have to take action ourselves. Then we have a responsibility to get involved. And it doesn’t have to be in a political party right away, it can also be an association or an initiative (or a theatre group). Or a demonstration. But it has to be democratic. And – and this also needs to be said very clearly: there are no easy solutions. We can forget about that – and that’s fine, because we’re still doing theatre here. And that brings us back to the conspiracy theories.

I would like a happy ending.

One of the main arguments put forward as to why people can get lost in conspiracy theories is the explanatory patterns they offer: simple solutions to complex problems. And that is always a mistake. Even if it is easier to follow the simple solutions offered – in politics and in the world of fairy tales – the paths we must take to move forward in our society and, above all, to stay together are long and arduous. That’s how it has to be; that’s democracy. But I don’t want to end this interjection on that note. That’s a terrible ending: the right path is the one that annoys us the most. I’ll take another run at it and try this: You are at a symposium on conspiracy narratives, which I have conceived with great pleasure because, for years, I have had colleagues and allies in the theatre collective Pièrre.Vers who are committed to a democratic society through artistic and, in some cases, activist means. They have decided that art can mean something, can have meaning, without forgetting that political theatre is still just theatre. And they are not alone. With your presence – yes, yours, dear audience – this theatre evening becomes democracy in action. Just as this text here is democracy in action. That sounds very grand for a single theatre evening, but democratic life begins in small ways, begins with us, between us, with us. And that’s where you can feel it. And however you feel about this text and this evening, one thing you will know for sure: if you want democracy in this country to survive the current turbulent times, then you are not alone. We are with you and you are with us. And that is the much better ending to this interjection.

Amazingly hopeful in the end,
Yours, Juliane Hendes

Kunst ist bedroht, Künstler*innen sind in Gefahr. Was bedeutet es, in Iran die Geschichte von Mädchen in einer Teheraner Schule zu erzählen? Und was bedeutet es für die Künstlerinnen, dieses Stück mit dem Titel » است» (Ist) den Menschen in Düsseldorf zu präsentieren? Autor und Heine-Preisträger Juri Andruchowytsch blickt gemeinsam mit dem asphalt-Publikum auf die Inszenierung seines Romans »Moscoviáda« und darauf, dass sich seine Dystopie 30 Jahre später nahezu eingelöst hat. Also lasst uns reden.

Wie reden wir miteinander, wie sehen wir einander? Und wie kommen wir zusammen – im Skatepark, am Esstisch oder im Theater? Kommen Sie mit den Menschen ins Gespräch, die unsere Räume bespielen und sich mit Ihnen verbinden möchten. Im Anschluss an ausgewählte Vorstellungen laden wir als »Zugabe« zu Nachgesprächen mit Autor*innen, Regisseur*innen, Schauspieler*innen und Tänzer*innen ein. Es moderieren im Wechsel die Journalistin Marion Troja und die Kulturschaffende Miriam Owusu-Tutu.

Marion Troja ist Kommunikationsleiterin beim Deutschen Bühnenverein. Die Journalistin hat lange als Kulturredakteurin und Theaterkritikerin gearbeitet und in ihrer Zeit als stellvertretende Kommunikationsleiterin am Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus u. a. den Programmpodcast »Was wird hier gespielt?« moderiert.

Miriam Owusu-Tutu ist Kulturschaffende und arbeitet seit Jahren mit verschiedenen kulturellen Institutionen in Düsseldorf und NRW zusammen. Sie ist Gründungsmitglied der Kollektive »Schwarzes Haus« und »Shapes &Shades«. Außerdem ist sie Dramaturgieassistentin am Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus.

The idea that homosexuality could be ‘cured’ has been around for a long time, but it was only towards the end of the 19th century that the idea became established. Originally, homosexuality was regarded as a hereditary disease and equated with hysteria, epilepsy and schizophrenia. The treatment and re-education methods that were more frequently applied to lesbians at the time took place in institutions where girls were often sexually abused and raped. A little later, ‘gay bacteria’ were blamed for homosexuality, so that the ‘undesirable’ attraction of gay men was to be eliminated by transplanting testicles.

Sigmund Freud was of the opinion that all people are originally bisexual and only become heterosexual in the course of psychosocial processes. As a result, medical treatment of homosexuality was ‘very difficult or almost impossible’. Freud’s letter to the mother of a gay son (1935) is well known: ‘Homosexuality is not an advantage, but it is also nothing to be ashamed of’, he writes. Freud explained to the woman that homosexuality could not be regarded as an illness, but as a variant of sexuality, and that he was very sceptical about the results of treatment. Although Freud leaves open the possibility that he could develop the ‘germs of heterosexuality’ in her son, he is of the opinion that it would be better to make him happier and less neurotic with the help of psychoanalysis, whether he remained homosexual or not.

In contrast to Sigmund Freud, later psychoanalysts regarded homosexuality as a pathological perversion of the Oedipus complex, and so between Freud’s death and the final removal of homosexuality from the list of diseases (1973), many years followed with various attempts and treatment methods. Attempts were often made to cure men with lobotomies, ice baths, hormones, castration, sterilisation, vomiting therapy and electric shocks. As in the film ‘A Clockwork Orange’, patients were shown homosexual content and then injected with drugs to induce vomiting in order to develop disgust at what was being played. The desired result was achieved in most cases, but also produced disgust with all forms of sexuality and sexual frustration. Something similar was tried with electric shocks to male genitalia when they were aroused by the ‘wrong stimulus’, which was an attempt to reflex condition homosexuals like bears and dogs in experiments.

Years after homosexuality was removed from the list of mental disorders, various pseudo-scientific therapies continued in psychological practices, isolated camps and religious communities. In most cases, families sent children and adolescents for treatment where they were subjected to humiliation, traumatic manipulation or violence. Although none of the methods mentioned have ever been successful or scientifically proven, although they almost always caused depression, anxiety, guilt and dehumanisation, suicidal thoughts and attempts, there are still people who advocate or actively carry out the treatment of homosexuality. There are a small number of countries that strictly prohibit the practice of conversion therapy, but with the proliferation of self-help movements, a body of counselling literature on healing from homosexuality has emerged. One such book, which can be found on the psychology shelf in bookshops, is the subject of our piece ‘Our Son’.

I see my project ‘Our Son’ as an attempt to understand my sexuality. By playing with autobiographical elements and those of my family – on the border between truth and fiction – I apply available psychological and ‘parapsychological’ theories to understand the sexual identity I live with today. With a lot of humour, irony and jokes at our own expense, we offer the audience an intimate theatrical experience in a non-traditional stage space where they witness a fictional meeting of mother, father and son. Here, scores are settled and (un)healed wounds, (un)satisfied needs and fears are questioned. Why should you watch it? Perhaps you can find in my silence all that is unspoken in your families, perhaps you can recognise your own red lines in my dilemmas, and perhaps you can question in my honesty your own readiness for the new time that has already come.

‘Our Son’ was created for the Heartefact Pride Theatre Festival, which took place during Pride Week as part of EuroPride 2022 in Belgrade. The play was performed several times for domestic and foreign guests and received very positive reviews, which proves that the production goes beyond the local and regional theme and is a universally understandable story about acceptance and expectations. The play continues to be performed regularly in Belgrade and is also invited to international guest performances. ‘Our Son’ contributes not only to creating an open space for diversity, but also to raising awareness of EuroPride in Belgrade – the first EuroPride in this part of Europe and outside the European Union, which, despite all the difficulties and obstacles, has managed to assert itself and show a more tolerant and open-minded Belgrade and Serbia.

The play was originally performed in a Belgrade flat in order to let the audience literally enter a person’s private sphere. This concept stems from my experience that when talking about homosexuality, there is often a great need to peek into the most intimate parts of each other’s lives. In addition, the constellation in which the audience and the actors sit in the same living room, where the audience can smell the soup and the lasagne, allows for a stronger emotional experience. But there is also a version for theatres and dance halls, where the play can be performed in front of around a hundred people. In this version [shown at the asphalt festival], the audience surrounds the actors on three sides, limiting the playing space.

After every performance, we receive sincere, emotional and often poignant messages from the audience. I would like to share one of them with you, while respecting the privacy and identity of the sender:

‘It took me some time to come to my senses after the play. I wanted to thank you for what we saw. As someone who hasn’t spoken to her mother for a long time because she can’t accept my sexuality, these dialogues were our dialogues. These exchanges, the silences, the rejections… It’s like watching my life unfold. And there is no relief except to recognise the patterns of behaviour and the shared pain that families like this find themselves in. After the performance I went outside, turned the corner, sat on a bench and cried. I realise now that the inability to accept tells me all I need to know.’

Isabél Zuaa: A healthy exchange is important within society, but in reality this exchange has been unbalanced for several centuries. Because we know everything about our white fellow human beings – we know their books, their philosophers, their religion – and our fellow human beings don’t really know us. Maybe they know our food, maybe they know our fingerprints, but they don’t know our pains, maybe they don’t even know our joys. We are on the stage to share. It takes a moment of listening to create a different understanding. I know white artists, I’ve met them in books, I’ve met them on stage, I’ve met them in the cinema, and now I’m going to introduce myself. It’s not someone else’s view of me, it’s my own view of my own experience. 

Nádia Yracema: We take a moment on stage to talk without being interrupted. When you talk about racism and people don’t want to listen, they say: ‘But I’m not racist!’ We just ask the audience to listen to what we have to say. We don’t want them to take it as a personal attack in any way. But you can have black friends and be racist, you can like the food of other cultures and be racist, you can date black people and be racist and perpetuate racism! That’s just it. It’s rooted in our upbringing. And both sides have to deconstruct that.

Cleo Diára: We need to have a serious and responsible conversation about who we are as a society without feeling attacked. And give other people and the existence of other stories a chance, because if there is only one story, it means that a part is silenced, as the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says. Because we are all part of this society, and for me that is the key point: we have this opportunity to not always be marginalised by the stories we are told. The first black woman I saw on stage was Isabél in Mozambique in 2017. I didn’t used to go to the theatre. But when a black body occupies a space, you see yourself represented, and this representation gives you the opportunity to dream.

Isabél Zuaa: I often went to the theatre and to exhibitions and I was the only black woman in these places, not only on stage but also backstage! And I automatically thought: ‘This place is not for me, I’m not welcome there.’ Most of the time I was treated very well, but it was black-only syndrome in a privileged environment. Nádia and Cleo were lucky enough to attend the conservatory together. But I, although much loved and appreciated, was the only one at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema, and many of the things I said people didn’t understand. It’s all very complex because you don’t conform to what people expect of you. So I had the feeling that I was in a non-place. Today I believe that this is an in-between place of experience. I lived in Brazil between 2012 and 2016 and made performances and photographs on these themes. But not in Portugal, the country where I was born – I don’t know if I can call it my home country. And when I came back and met first Cleo and then Nádia, I realised what an opportunity it was to have two black women artists, my mirrors! We could talk about issues that we knew because we had the same experiences. And the three of us worked together on our desires.

Nádia Yracema: At the beginning, we wanted to talk about the issue of black working women who make it possible for this society to continue to exist in a certain way, who clean, who wash, who wake up at four in the morning and nobody sees them, who do everything and then disappear. And then we realised that the story of our mothers is exactly the story of these women who have always worked in the kitchen, in the factory, at their cleaning job. And suddenly we also talked about what makes us special and realised that we had a lot in common. I’ve been Portuguese now – since December, 20 years after I came here! It’s also a struggle for Cléo, who came to Portugal when she was 10 or 11, and for Isabél, who was born here in Estefânia. So there were very strong points of connection: our mothers, this place in between, the question of how to look at the stage. Before I studied and became an artist, I thought that in the world of art I would find a place where I could exist without shame, where there wouldn’t be the prejudices about my body that I felt in society. And it was a shock for me to realise how present these structures are in Portuguese art and how elitist it is and how it still perpetuates stereotypes, conventions and narratives that are completely exclusionary and long-lasting. So the scholarship opened a door [Aurora Negra is the winning project of the 2019 Amélia Rey Colaço Scholarship].

Cleo Diára: It really is a sisterhood that has formed, it’s about looking out for each other. We can write together, think together, but also overcome the ‘single black woman syndrome’, the loneliness of black women that we don’t often talk about, this suffering that we carry around with us, these traumas. How can we verbalise it, how can we discover words, books, songs, rituals, remedies? And this discovery is also a path for us. It is a path that we can name. And this naming is very important: we say something that the other denies, and so a gap is created that leads to serious disagreement. Then comes a time when you start to question yourself! How can it be that something that is so visible, so tangible for me does not pass on to the other person? How is it possible that there is such a big gap? So that’s what it is, to recognise that it exists and that it is concrete and that it has a name: the feeling that a shiver runs down your spine, that has a name. This feeling of being alone in the room, always, that has a name. This feeling that we are ashamed when the other person makes a racist joke – although it’s not us who should be ashamed, but the other person – that has a name.

‘In the theatre or at exhibitions, I was the only black woman, not only on stage but also backstage.’

Isabél Zuaa: It goes from the most obvious to the most subtle: going to the theatre and not being seen, going into a shop and being watched by security guards, going to a casting and not being recognised as an applicant at all …

Cleo Diára: Sometimes you get a script that’s full of prejudices and you have to think about how to tell the person who wrote it that it’s not right. In our own play, I don’t have to explain that. I don’t have to be an educator or be embarrassed to ask myself whether I should talk about what I’ve written or not.

Isabél Zuaa: Because we can’t just be actresses. We are black actresses and therefore …

Nádia Yracema:  … also teachers, educators.  

Isabél Zuaa: We have to teach how to be treated and we also have to somehow make people think about the things they write, but without them feeling offended. It’s very complex because we often don’t have the courage to say, ‘Look, you’re upholding completely racist and violent conventions about my body and using that as a joke, and I’m really embarrassed and hurt by that.’ And that’s what we’re talking about in ‘Aurora Negra’ in 2020.

»A year ago, I concluded the opening speech at the poetry festival at the Academy of Arts in Berlin with the words that I was sorry that poetry doesn’t kill. This speech became a program. Translated into many languages, it was disseminated in many countries. Wherever I went afterward, my desire for a poetry that kills was the cause of conversations and interviews. My regret that poetry cannot be an instrument of punishment, not even a means of self-defense, was largely perceived in wealthy European countries as something threatening, something that transcends convention. After all, for generations, the civilized world has made every effort to establish rules and laws for peaceful coexistence and to insist on their observance, to draw red lines that, in the interest of the common good, must not be crossed. Aggression is not tolerated; war is relegated behind the fences of the European future, indeed, to the gates of the civilized world.

And suddenly it became clear that this repression and sweeping of aggression under the rug not only didn’t work, but worse still – it no longer allowed for any distinction between aggressor and victim, banishing them both equally behind border walls, the one who attacks and the one who defends. If you place both of these situations far removed from any normality and observe them from a safe distance, at a certain point you stop differentiating between who started it and who had no other choice, what was the cause and what was the consequence. When Russia uses the term “pacification,” to an educated person with a knowledge of Latin in their cultural background, it sounds like “pacification,” it sounds like “peacefulness” and peaceful tranquility, something that gently lulls you to sleep like the “Pacific” Ocean and is as politically correct as “pacifism.” We always judge others according to our own perception of the world and the landmarks of our value system. That is why the Ukrainians did not believe in a comprehensive Russian attack until the last minute, because they applied the standards of their own country, a liberal, democratic European country that cannot understand the logic and aggressiveness of an imperial war of conquest.

European pacifism seeks to recognize something spiritually related to Russian “pacification,” to see it as a method, admittedly with a somewhat brutal, colonial aftertaste, but one that nevertheless leads to the noble goal of peace. European pacifism seeks to hear something true in the slogan “We are against war” of the Russians who emigrated during the war, to discover something they can relate to, and expects similar statements from Ukrainians as well. On a purely conceptual level, if I don’t declare that I am “against war,” I am consequently “for war.” This level fails to take into account the fact that if Ukraine were “against war,” there would be no more war, but there would also be no Ukraine. Yet war is a horror that destroys everything humankind has to offer: the psyche, the environment, economic relations, absolutely everything. And so we’re being advised to reach an agreement, turn the other cheek, let an eye be an eye, a tooth be a tooth, and give up the Ukrainian territories Russia has conquered and occupies. Someone has to be the wisest, we’re told.

This is a good and humane admonition, one that we have all heard more than once as children from a loving mother when we did not want to share something with our siblings. Mother Europe loves us both equally; she tries to be dispassionate and objective. Her maternal love blinds Mother Europe: aggression and recklessness are seen by her as willpower and charisma, the desire to appropriate what is foreign as youthful exuberance that will grow out of, and the violation of boundaries as a natural consequence of greatness. The template of the large family, superimposed on the map of Europe, which is steeped in the blood of more than one generation, does not allow us to see the spectres of colonialism, totalitarianism and racism. It raises false expectations regarding the humanity, reasonableness and predictability of behaviour. And so it happens that what we Europeans are not prepared to see, what we have no instruments to describe, what we do not allow into our imagination – for us, it simply does not exist.

And so it came to pass that we Ukrainians found ourselves at the gates of normality, outside the civilised world, on the fringes of a history that thinks categorically abstract and general, and in which our losses are considered statistically negligible material. For the past 16 months, I have been unable to shake the feeling that we are candidates in a cruel and bloodthirsty reality show format, scripted according to all the rules of the art: the audience is kept hooked by constantly ratcheting up the level of violence and adding new aspects to the range of challenges facing Ukrainians. The plot is kept unpredictable, the resolution saved until the very end. It is an adrenaline-fuelled game of sheer survival, exciting for the uninvolved viewer, who is close to the victim, can be horrified by the scenes of death or doubt their authenticity, believe something or not believe it, debate, donate, look away, wonder whether it is already time to say ‘stop’. Oh my goodness, we failed to agree on ‘stop,’ it doesn’t work at all!

War is not a storyline that can be reset and rewritten so that it plays out differently or the dead are given new lives. War is not a reality show, not a LAN game, and certainly not a civilisational experiment. Your culture has become accustomed to shielding you from unpleasant things. Your social media can be configured to hide unsightly and sensitive content from you, which is supposed to keep your humanity intact. At the same time, cruelty and aggression continue to be in high demand in the entertainment market, as they provide thrills and adrenaline rushes, allowing the human animal to feel alive. The nature of violence and evil haunts researchers and artists, forcing them to look into the abyss of horror. But all this only as long as it remains at a safe distance, behind the plasma of a screen, in a past that will certainly never repeat itself. Until recently, we in Ukraine also lived in a world where war was considered part of the culture. It is never a real war.

Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale aggression, we have found ourselves in someone’s diabolical game, in an irreversible time, a reality that follows completely inhuman rules. We are mortally wounded, struck by an ever more monstrous and insidious evil. We too wish to distance ourselves from it, to be able to separate ourselves from this evil, not to have to participate, not to have to join in this game, to retreat behind a line where we are safe. But it has become clear that there is no such line for us. Pacifism and humanity cannot make this war cease to exist. They cannot prevent it from killing us. They do not save us from the death of our children, nor do they protect us from the ecocide of the deliberately caused global catastrophe of the blown-up Kakhovka dam. Events are unfolding in an unpredictable manner, sweeping away ever larger pieces of reality. I don’t want to scare you, that’s not my style. But as the Baroque poet John Donne once wrote: ‘Every clod that is washed away shrinks Europe – no man is an island.’ Hemingway revives Donne’s motif of the bell. His bell is one in times of war, tolling for each and every one of us.

In his ‘Lectures on the History of Philosophy,’ Hegel went so far as to suggest that there must be a war in every generation, since war purifies our thinking and straightens out our ideas about the world, gives us impetus for new things and, incidentally, also maintains the logical structure of our world. Leaving his world of impersonal theorising and turning to concrete realities, it is hard to deny that war is indeed an extremely painful form of purification and eradication of dead truths, empty concepts, outdated ideas and false values. Yes, it makes social change more dynamic, but at the high price of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees. We can theorise as long as we are at a safe distance, as long as no war affects us, as long as none of our loved ones die in a war. In war, in the midst of it, on its territory, it is impossible to theorise.

As an existential crisis, war puts people in situations where they have to make a choice, often without the time or opportunity to weigh up options, think things through or even distance themselves from the circumstances in order to assess them properly … In effect, this means making a choice without having a choice. When we were confronted with war, many people initially could not let go of their humanistic ideas. But war turned out to be thoroughly inhuman, cruel and unjust. For me personally, the first weeks of war and brutality were a time when I reflected on what I had learned from my grandparents’ generation and realised that the stories about the horror perpetrated by the Soviet NKVD in western Ukraine between 1939 and 1941 had not been exaggerated, as one might sometimes have thought. This is how we revise our ideas about war, or update them in return and develop a new understanding of our knowledge of the past. What can a person oppose to war – a specific person facing a specific threat to their life, a specific loss of a loved one, their home, their familiar way of life …?

The most effective mechanism that civilisation has devised so far to prevent people and societies from waging war is culture. Its influence is, of course, incomparably more complex than other inhibiting factors. Culture operates not only within the framework of a single generation and always under strict guidelines – namely, with the aim of curbing violence and resolving disputes peacefully and without hegemonic claims, usurpation or encroachment on foreign territory. Culture therefore bears responsibility. I remember numerous discussions with Russian authors in the past, in which I had to put up with the accusation that Ukrainian literature was too politically engaged, that our writers were overly ideologised and did not focus on pure art, but on social dynamics that did not deserve such attention. However, as we have come to understand, this Russian self-elimination from the sphere of preventive, humane influence on society and the process of the natural dissemination of the corresponding values has proved fatal. For us in particular, it has had terrible consequences.

In Ukraine, which has often been stateless, culture has served as a forum for expressing civic positions since the earliest days of Kievan Rus. The majority of Ukrainian Baroque authors, for example, wanted to see the chance for salvation or self-transcendence not only in people’s religious and spiritual practices, but also in their active support of civic dynamics, the assumption of a certain degree of responsibility and appropriate action. That is why we have poems by Hetman Masepa and Cossack chronicles whose authors understand the purely human dimension of history and illustrate that you cannot save yourself without also being good to your fellow human beings. A good example of this is Hryhorij Skoworoda: he lived in isolation, but with the awareness that everyone must follow their own moral imperative.

In my opinion, the poetry that emerged after the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine is comparatively direct, devoid of artistic gimmicks, without allusions, metaphors or other poetic flourishes. It is poetry of emotional facts that deliberately strives for simple, concrete and unambiguous language. It has something documentary about it, transparent like the lens of a camera, which does not want to draw attention to itself. Nevertheless, this poetry remains anchored in the formal language of poetic expression, in which words relate to each other and mean more than they do in a journalistic or conversational context. The responsibility and weight of words have increased. For us, every word carries a great deal of meaning.

For the more extensive form of prose, however, more time and distance from the events are needed. A novel or a narrative requires the author to immerse themselves in the material until they have to detach themselves from it at the appropriate time, as they would from any factual reality, in order to then be able to relate to it as artistic material that no longer stirs up emotions or causes pain, triggers nothing, that can be shuffled like a deck of cards to determine the rules of the game and distribute the joker roles. But as long as your current reality is so intense and painful, you will not be able to distance yourself from your pain or put a stop to it with a ‘Stop!’, which is killing you. And as long as that is the case, you will not be able to write good prose. Most novelists are currently, consciously or unconsciously, gathering material by taking notes, writing diaries, experiencing things intensely and committing them to memory. Some unconsciously throw themselves with all their might into the maelstrom of events, because that is probably the best way to feel and understand what is happening. Many go where it hurts. Every impression is valuable. But in order to process this material and let it ‘dance’ into a coherent work of art, with a well-thought-out plot, a cast of characters and an artfully arranged conflict dramaturgy, inner resources are needed. However, our short-term and working memory is currently occupied with other things. In the midst of this war, we are operating on a survival level. Reality constantly forces us to pay attention to alarm signals, to adjust to sudden changes in our environment and in our own emotional state, and to cope with a multitude of situations for which there is no blueprint.

It is very difficult and usually impossible to remain emotionally unaffected when the news feed once again reports hundreds of deaths or heavy shelling. Something horrific happens or we watch a traumatic video, and suddenly we have forgotten the place within ourselves from which we previously viewed the world, so dynamically do we change. Great prose will therefore be something for the future, when we can concentrate again and analyse what has happened to us and how it has changed us. Then we will return to all our reflections and all the material that is currently stored at the edges of our consciousness and in the blind spots of our memory.

Between 2014 and 2022, a number of literary works about the war were published in Ukraine. Literature reinforced what media resources conveyed in terms of content and often served to reinforce and sharpen the arguments. It is sad that, with a few exceptions, this war literature is hardly present in the West. At the time, no one in Ukraine was quite sure how and to what extent this war could and should be addressed in literature. In literary circles, there were certain prejudices against ‘veterans’ literature,’ which was supposedly insufficiently professional. But it was more a case of the ‘professional’ literary scene not engaging sufficiently with the subject of war. It was difficult to find a publisher or an audience that really understood or appreciated war poetry, except for those who had fought in this war, done voluntary service or been directly affected by it. Today, the theme of war has tragically burst onto the literary scene. War is before the eyes of millions of people and has either updated or radically challenged everything we thought we knew about war from previous literature and art.

Literature cannot exist in a vacuum. It is not written exclusively for eternity, nor can it strive solely for purity. It cannot ignore social and political events, wars and historical challenges any more than it can ignore reality itself. Rather, literature must throw itself into the fray, put its finger on the wound, give meaning to what is difficult to comprehend, and answer the questions that require courage to ask. For, as it turns out, war is a touchstone for humanity and authenticity. In literature and art as well as in personal values.

With the start of the full-scale war of aggression, many of us were faced with the question of what is personally important to us, what we would never renounce, and how far we would go. Let’s not kid ourselves – everyone has their own scale of values, their own experiences and circumstances, and not everyone understands the decisions of others. But without exception, all of us (even those who left Ukraine immediately) have experienced the effects of the war in some form. Some have been affected more, some less, but we all have a lot of work ahead of us to transform this collective trauma into an experience that no longer hurts, where we can live with it and not retraumatise or hurt others… But the more traumatised we become, the harder it is to explain our trauma, the less we want to talk about it or even have to prove how difficult or painful the experience was and is. It is much easier for foreigners to understand the people in Russia and their problems with sanctions (you can’t go to McDonald’s, buy an iPhone or fly on holiday) than to comprehend the highly complex Ukrainian experiences (such as burying relatives in the courtyard of an apartment block, mass rape, the borderline experience of torture and the like). Only culture can make these experiences accessible so that they can be understood by others through literary, cinematic and artistic adaptation. Works of art filter out the salient aspects of difficult experiences. A single, eloquent artistic detail can encapsulate the full force of the tragedy and open the way to catharsis.

There is no such thing as absolute, faceless, abstract evil (or good). There is always a human dimension. There is always a specific person responsible. In Christianity, as in other worldviews, the decision between good and evil and the struggle for it takes place within the human being – constantly, every second anew. It is important to be vigilant at all times and to examine whether one is choosing the good. The values realised in our culture remind us of the possibility of making this decision anew every day. When we move to the level of abstraction, take a neutral position, rise above the situation and want to remove ourselves from the conflict or confrontation, we are in fact claiming the position of God or the standpoint of a pure moral imperative. But in doing so, we lose our very personal inner struggle between good and evil. Every ‘that’s none of my business’ acknowledges the right of the stronger and means washing one’s hands with reference to hygiene purposes.

War tests literature for its authenticity and casts doubt on its raison d’être. But the power of literature lies precisely in the fact that it helps to preserve what is human in people and helps them to resist and oppose evil. Literature also has the power to be a refuge for the desperate and a source of hope for those who have lost more than they can muster in inner strength. Literature can be a home for someone who has lost their home, it can be the cross on the grave of someone whose body was never found to be buried. It can bear witness to a miracle and bear witness for those who were not there. In times of war, this power of literature grows among the people who are living through the war. Sometimes the artistic response is the only possible way to relate to a reality that undermines the foundations of bare existence.

Like most of us, I cannot yet relate to this war as if it were just any other subject matter; I cannot yet detach myself from it. We are all in the midst of this war; we are all affected by it. We therefore have a very subjective and specific inner perspective that just manages to capture what is happening. The most important thing for us right now is to get through it. We are living in a mode of struggle and survival. This is not exactly the most suitable state for artistic distance or reflection. It is difficult to analyse an image that you cannot see in its entirety, but only in part, highlighted, fragmented or blurred. The human brain sets about searching this image for signs of normality, somehow trying to make sense of the exceptional situation. Because it is the only way to survive.

At the same time, I am witnessing how our literature is returning to very primitive, basic functions. These are not aesthetic functions, nor are they functions of enjoyment or entertainment, but rather forms of prayer, incantation, curse, confession or remembrance of the dead. All of these are phenomena and functions that were also familiar to the original, syncretic poetry. What has atrophied in the course of the further development of societies and the differentiation of cultures reappears in times of war. Ukrainian poetry is gaining unexpected strength in this war, allowing it to speak of the fundamental and archetypal, of the depths of the human spirit and human existence, into which professional poets have long since dared not venture.

I would also like to mention that Ukrainian poetry is currently extremely rich in forms and images and is experiencing an extraordinary upswing. Everything that Ukrainian literature is currently producing, from the strongest and highest-quality texts to pure, simple, confessional outcries, bears witness to unique processes that will shape our literary output for decades to come. People who have never written anything poetic before are now beginning to write poetry, and often their works are particularly powerful. They may be far removed from any sophisticated formal language and be mere confessions, but their sincerity and spontaneity make one forget their weaknesses and lack of professionalism. These spontaneous poetic forms will later enable us to understand how literature in general, and poetry in particular, develop in the extraordinary and difficult times of war.

Our reality now provides us with a wealth of material for observing others and ourselves, especially how people behave in times of war and crisis. War changes people, often in ways that cannot be reversed. For me personally, the traumatic quality of what we are currently going through is at the forefront. Words have a direct impact on traumatic experiences by calling things by their name. In one way or another, this war has traumatised each and every one of us psychologically, not to mention those it has also injured physically. A literary text can show ways out of trauma.

And so I would like to conclude with a poem about what literature means to me, because the last word should belong to poetry.”

Can I still take those two steps or should I stay here –
above the bodies scattered in unnatural positions
above the gaping holes in the rust of a burnt-out car
from bullets too big to kill anyone in particular.

The unprofitability of artistic resources, the world won’t believe any of it.
The lack of a coherent motive, explain to me why they kill you, you say,
there must be a reason. Such a plot would never make a book.
As long as it is still literature, there is always the possibility of stopping in time,
of not getting too close, where too much would be revealed to the eyes –
how they look, the broken nail on the well-manicured woman’s hand,
the child’s shoe among the remnants of a household.

Literature should be there to prevent what happened from happening in the first place –
to focus on prevention, to prevent the worst, to change the one
who could cause irreparable damage.

It is not there to make us believe afterwards
that a lonely child’s shoe has nothing to do with a child’s foot,
and that the woman’s broken nail is just her broken nail, no big deal.

Stop in time, don’t get too close, don’t look.
The saving distance of art, the guardrail of credibility, up to which everything
can still be a far-fetched plot, the forbidden spawn of a fantasy
in a mood of catastrophe.

Literature is no longer an escape route, it is a sidetrack,
from there you can’t go anywhere. You get on the train, pick up a book –
and understand: this train – doesn’t leave, doesn’t go to its destination, doesn’t arrive
there in the human being, where he can still make decisions –
leave forever and never come back
or pull the emergency brake and go all out.

Once, in times of need, you will revive the track,
you will dismantle the battering rams, you will allow yourselves to look.
In a world where literature is not there to kill, and not there to pay bills
​​​​​and not there to flood with spam, and not there to remember everything down to the last detail,
and not to fix reality in its most repulsive forms.

Literature like that is good for nothing, you hear.

The child’s shoe that flew through the air with the child when both were swirled up with shattering glass
and concrete,
the broken nail on the woman’s hand under the rubble, unpixelated,
what remained of the body,
the children’s book you stare at so as not to notice the rest,
so as not to imagine the rest that was there between the book and the hand,
between a family’s Saturday morning and the next image.

If you get too close, the reinforcing steel pierces you
with someone’s stifled cry under the rubble:
‘I don’t want to die.’ Literature is there to clear away these rubble in time.

Literature is there to show us how we can go on living,
with this scream in our ears, with the woman’s hand, the child’s shoe in close-up,
knowing what was behind it in the uncensored version of reality,
which no artificial intelligence softens for us.

For this. Literature has always been there for this.

No names, no memory.
On 27 July 2000, a bomb filled with TNT exploded at Wehrhahn S-Bahn station in Düsseldorf, injuring ten people. A woman who was five months pregnant lost her unborn child. The investigation by the local police remained inconclusive for a long time, and although the first indications of a neo-Nazi known in the neighbourhood quickly emerged and although the group of people affected – consisting of ethnic German immigrants and so-called contingent refugees – suggested a racist and anti-Semitic motive, it was not until eighteen years later that Ralf S. was brought to trial, at the end of which he was acquitted. The attacks in Hanau, Solingen and Mölln are at least partially anchored in the collective memory. The anniversaries in particular are covered extensively and nationwide. This does not apply to the Düsseldorf attack. Why not? Because nobody died? Because although there was an accused, no one was ever found guilty? Or is there another reason why the incident not only did not enter the German national memory, but did not even really enter the city’s memory?

Social echo chamber – sovereignty of interpretation.
The situation in the summer of 2000 shortly after the attack was initially confusing. The city of Düsseldorf was faced with a major challenge and the police investigations were only part of it. How does a city deal with such a violent event? A debate arose around this question. Opinions, categorisations and conflicting perspectives on such incidents always accompany the battle for the right to interpret what has happened. It is the battle over how the situation will be interpreted in the future. This is significantly influenced by local and national journalists, politicians, authorities of all kinds and social actors – each with their own agenda. Public announcements create the mood in which the investigating authorities carry out their tasks. They influence the formation of opinion in our society, which in turn can have an impact on social processes on the one hand, and on people willing to use violence in the future on the other. And they are also the echo chamber that determines what is remembered and how, and what is not.

The public always plays a part. – That’s you and me.
Let me give you an example: In the 1990s – against the backdrop of the war in Yugoslavia and the resulting immigration – democratic representatives in Germany (above all the CDU/CSU and SPD) took up right-wing narratives and fuelled sentiment against asylum seekers. ‘Just a few weeks after the pogrom in Hoyerswerda, the then CDU Secretary General Volker Rühe wrote a letter calling on all district associations to ‘make asylum policy an issue in local and city councils, district parliaments and state parliaments’. (…) This was followed by the familiar front pages of Spiegel, Bild and other newspapers with headlines such as ‘The boat is full’, ‘Onslaught of the poor’ and so on,’ writes Esther Dischereit for the Federal Agency for Civic Education. The main issue was Article 16a of the Basic Law: ‘The right to asylum has constitutional status as a fundamental right in Germany.’ The debate about the article exacerbated the mood in the country and led, among other things, to the pogrom in Rostock-Lichtenhagen in 1992, in the aftermath of which the right of asylum was tightened to such an extent that it could be understood as having been abolished to a certain extent. Whereas the perpetrators either got away with it completely unpunished or with only marginal penalties. ‘The NSU core trio and their supporters drew their self-confidence from this experience of impunity, even for the most serious crimes. And the right-wing assassins of today who were socialised in this generation – such as Frank Steffen, who attempted to send a political signal against Cologne Mayor Henriette Reker’s refugee policy by assassinating her in October 2015, or Stephan Ernst, the alleged murderer of Kassel District President Walter Lübcke – are directly linked to their experiences in the 1990s, both ideologically and in their choice of forms of action,’ Dischereit continues. The mood not only influences potential perpetrators. Mitat Özdemir, chairman of the Keupstraße interest group, reported after the NSU attack in Cologne in 2004: ‘Police officers came, accompanied by journalists, and asked about the perpetrators. When we answered: Neo-Nazis, they kept asking. And who else could it have been? At some point, we just said what they wanted to hear.’ Afterwards, some reported on it, others were asked to investigate. It’s like a perpetual motion machine: the way in which such offences are dealt with has an impact on what offences will happen in the future and how they will be dealt with in turn.

One of the most memorable pieces at FIND 2019, which took place before the pandemic, was created by Chile’s Teatro La Re-Sentida: ‘Paisajes para no colorear’ (Landscapes that must not be painted). His unsparing examination of femicide and gender-specific violence was performed on stage by young Chilean women aged between 13 and 18. The raw emotionality of their performance sent a palpable shockwave through the audience.

A set diagram of state structures, capitalism, border groups, gender-specific violence, the body and the stage – this is the stuff that director Marco Layera’s theatre is made of. He returns this year with his fourth FIND production, which is also a world premiere: ‘Oasis de la Impunidad’. The play is a production of the Teatro La Re-Sentida and the Münchner Kammerspiele – in co-production with the Schaubühne and Matucana 100. I also spoke to the dramaturges Elisa Leroy and Martín Valdés-Stauber, who have worked together both in Chile and here in Germany.

Layera is affable and reserved, initially keeping his ideas to himself before articulating them vividly and very eloquently. He talks emotionally about ‘Paisajes para no colorear’ as the ‘most beautiful theatre experience’ he has ever had: ‘It was an important moment to combine artistic and social practice, to create, change and relate to a community.’

Following the completion of this theatre project and its close collaboration with young people, La Re-Sentida experienced a shattering political moment in Chile that began on 18 October 2019. This event is known as the ‘Estallido Social’, the ‘social eruption’. The protests began as a reaction to something as mundane as the increase in public transport fares in Santiago and expanded to combat the country’s slide towards privatisation and social inequality. Millions of people took to the streets and the government responded brutally.

When a human becomes an ape, the order of time is suspended. The evolutionary history of humanity—aiming at ever greater individuation—short-circuits. A development spanning millions of years dissolves in a moment of transformation.

Thorsten Lensing’s theater is a theater of immediacy. It’s never just about chaos, never just about fun, never just about precision, never just about human abysses—but always about the present. One of the central experiences in his productions is that the present can be saved—because in it, people and things are set free.

I myself do not come from the theater world, and neither did the architects Gordian Blumenthal and Ramun Capaul, who had never designed a stage set before working with Lensing. That’s not surprising: “No closed world, please,” is this director’s recurring mantra.

These were my first theater rehearsals. I saw people transform into a turtle and an ape. I saw Ursina Lardi and Devid Striesow become younger and younger. When they first slipped into the roles of siblings Felix and Charlotte, much of what the audience now sees in the first part of the performance was already there. But their age only slowly faded, step by step and in unexpected leaps. Suddenly, thirty-year-olds were standing before us performing the opening scene. Then they became twenty, seventeen, fifteen years old. Shortly before the premiere, Devid Striesow sat on the floor like an eleven-year-old, playing with the frayed edge of his bath towel, hands before him. He sat there as Felix, remembering, in completely permeable words, sentences of his late father—sentences that had now taken on such a peculiar weight in his mouth that they neither fell heavily to the ground nor floated lightly into the air, but hovered steadily, bringing the past into the present. Rarely does one experience so intensely that we carry sentences within us that are actually time capsules—preserving the moment when a specific person once spoke them to us in their unmistakable voice.

Memory and immediacy—both are essential to theater. Living with the invisible, pulling the absent into the present, reviving the present through play and at the same time blasting it open—these are the core motifs of “Mad About Solace”. And none of it is new. It belongs to the oldest traditions of humanity. The desire to transform and the importance of transformation are reflected in the earliest myths and rituals.

Charlotte and Felix play their dead parents at the beach. They imitate them with the precision of a child’s eye for the quirks of adults, and with a strong delight in exaggeration. When they portray them, they are so close to their parents that they forget their absence. They lend them their breath, their bodies, so that father and mother can return to reality through them. Loneliness disappears. The parents are not just present. The children are the parents. And through their ability to mimic the sensual closeness that once existed between mother and father, Charlotte and Felix grow closer again. When Ursina Lardi lies on the ground crying with laughter as Devid Striesow tickles her, you get a sense of how the game with the past melts into a fleeting moment of unburdened joy. Suddenly you hear the mother’s laughter coming from Charlotte’s mouth. The siblings revel in memories of their parents, reaching a state of exuberance that mirrors the parents’ past joy. The parents’ joy becomes the children’s joy. This is the most concrete way to swim against the current of time. It is a resurrection out of love.

That’s why it’s all the more painful to witness how the game dissolves into memory and comes to an end. Playing the past is something else than remembering it. In memory, we know that the current moment is forever separated from the remembered one. But in play, memory and present merge, and one can forget the loss. But at the moment when Charlotte as the mother takes the child—herself—into her lap, we feel a shift. She wants to exit the game, and she does so by separating herself from Felix. Instead of playing shared memories, she delves deeper into personal ones—intimate moments between her and the mother. Charlotte slips out of the game into memory, as if leaving the present. She no longer plays the mother; she hears her voice inside herself. It’s the moment when the parents are no longer being acted out, but appear as remembered figures on stage. In the game, the rule was that past and present were one—but now the dimensions of time separate again. The past is past. The two children are left alone. The parents are only memory fragments within them. We are shown the source from which all the prior play has arisen—and to which it returns: memory.

As Charlotte exits the game and separates from Felix, she transforms into an octopus. She severs ties with the past and throws herself, with all her energy and zest for life, into the present.

The idea of continuing Charlotte’s character as an octopus wasn’t the result of any premeditated, logical concept—it was rather the echo of the impression the character had made. Her need to manage on her own, her impulsive and multifaceted energy—all of it made this metamorphosis seem inevitable. The transformation is both the most natural and most desperate choice.

The dramaturgy of the first part is one of suddenness. Everything takes place in a space that is wide, open, and uncontrollable. The characters are as unpredictable and vast as the sea from which they emerge. They are not prisoners of our perceptual abilities. Rather, our perception must try to keep up with their vitality. That’s why the first part has no consistent, unified level of reality. Everything appears in the glowing, intense, garish hues of childhood.