She She Pop
(Berlin)
THE RITE OF SPRING as performed by She She Pop and their mothers
Mousonturm Saal
25YMT/Performance/Theater
- 26.04.2014, 20.00 Uhr
- 27.04.2014, 6 p.m.THE RITE OF SPRING as performed by She She Pop and their mothers + talk with audience
No sooner has the smoke of the spectacular 100-year anniversary celebrations of Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps lifted, along come She She Pop and poke around in the embers. Together with their own mothers, the performers are staging the Rite of Spring: with the unfathomable topic of female sacrifice in the family and society taking centre stage. To sacrifice oneself as a woman for others is today clearly considered a sad achievement from an embarrassingly outdated normative agenda. The overriding importance of self-empowerment and personal freedom has placed an obscure light on all acts of sacrifice and devotion. The archaic rite of spring however stands for the certainty that every community demands sacrifices, why is even only really created and confirmed by collective sacrifice. By superimposing these two spheres, She She Pop touches on a subject, which silently stands between the generations and creates endless resistance and discord. The encounter between She She Pop, their mothers and the audience will therefore be staged in full ceremony. However, unlike the community assembling to celebrate their spring sacrifice in Stravinsky’s original piece, She She Pop and the mothers are by no means agreed about the procedure, quite the contrary. Doubts as to who or what should be sacrificed to whom and what the purpose of sacrifice is altogether have been surfacing right since the start. (But so has the resolution to attempt this together.)
Concept: She She Pop * By and with Cornelia and Sebastian Bark, Heike and Johanna Freiburg, Fanni Halmburger, Lisa Lucassen, Mieke Matzke, Irene and Ilia Papatheodorou, Heidi and Berit Stumpf, Nina Tecklenburg * sponsored by NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ (NPN).
On April 27th a talk with the audience will be moderated by Nikolaus Müller-Schöll.
Mousonturm Co-production
Biography
She She Pop
She She Pop is a performance collective that was founded in the 90s at the Giessen Institute for Applied Theatre Studies. Its members are Sebastian Bark, Johanna Freiburg, Fanni Halmburger, Lisa Lucassen, Mieke Matzke, Ilia Papatheodorou, Berit Stumpf and Elke Weber, their creative producer. The members of the group are predominantly women and they work as a collective. The performers see themselves as authors, dramaturges and practitioners of their stage art. The inclusion of their own autobiographies is above all the method and not the purpose of their work.
The result is a form of theatre firmly committed to experimentation. The stage is always a place of intense publicness. Here, decisions are made, ways of speaking and social systems are tested, and speech gestures and social rituals are tried, rehearsed or discarded. She She Pop sees its task as a search to find the social limits of communication – and to go beyond the protective space of the theatre, in both specific and artistic terms. The theatre is turned into a space for utopian communication. The audience, too, is often given a tangible attribution and a special feature: all of She She Pop’s works are experiments or demonstrations in some way, which would be invalid without spectators.