Hebbel am Ufer: Samba sí, work no

The hit, says performer Moses Leo at the beginning, is not actually a style of music, but the translation for the English term “hit”. A hit is only a hit because it is very successful, “a bestseller,” so to speak, an offer that one cannot “refuse.” “So come on, hit me!” “Hit me baby one more time!” Moses suddenly shouts aggressively to the audience and continues his word games for a while while – important detail – he rocks a baseball bat in his hand.

This is even used in a later scene. One by one, all the performers run towards the ramp and then collapse, screaming in pain, when struck by an invisible blow. The violence is definitely tangible, even if it only applies subcutaneously, like a structural fist in the stomach.

On the whole, the 70-minute evening with the title “I’ll take everything away from you – A hit ballet”, which celebrated its premiere on Wednesday in Berlin’s HAU, is a thoroughly cheerful event. The ensemble sings and satirizes hits, occasionally quotes Pina Bausch choreographies and rushes across the stage in cool outfits, in the middle of which the word “Blanco” sinks into the ground.

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But because the humor is usually a bit too bright and shrill, because the ensemble sings a bit too pompously, because the performers exert themselves too much in the parody, they always convey that the aim here is not just to make fun of something, but also to overcome something must be: namely German popular culture as a system of power. Director Joana Tischkau wants to subvert the German narrative of homeland with her “Schlagerballett,” but above all she points out the sometimes absurd relationship that Germans have with black artists and Blackness.

At the very beginning, the players step up to a microphone one after the other and say a few sentences about their roles. Moses Leo introduces himself as the singer Roy Black. His actual name is different, he got the nickname in his hometown of Augsburg “because of his black hair,” the black performer explained in a slight Alemannic dialect and got the first laugh. Deborah Macaulay, on the other hand, introduces herself in hot pants, traditional costume and a demonstratively broad Bavarian as Billy Mo, a musician born in Trinidad who had great success with folk music in the post-war period (“I’d rather buy myself a Tyrolean hat”).

Joana Tischkau – who has just received the Tabori Prize, the most important award in the German independent scene – is interested in such biographies. The director and choreographer, born in Göttingen in 1983, first studied dance and then applied theater studies in Giessen. The course is one of the most important training centers in the German independent scene. Nowhere else is the stage taken more seriously as a medium of social power relations than as a place where political communication is always taking place. From Giessen’s perspective, making theater is synonymous with ideological criticism. It is not enough to pay special attention to the signals that one sends out; it is necessary to constantly invent a new theater, to dismantle the stage as a whole, to remove it and to put it back together again. René Pollesch and groups like Rimini Protocol or Gob Squad come from this school.

Tischkau’s program seems a bit bourgeois in comparison, as she is very interested in German history. Four years ago, together with three colleagues, she curated the traveling “German Museum for Black Entertainment and Black Music,” which commemorates black artists and their influence on German popular culture. She continues this argument with “I’ll take everything away from you.”

Added to the hit is the argument with Pina Bausch. The choreographer conceived a “hit ballet” in her early days, hence the subtitle. Tischkau quotes and satirizes some of her famous works. It’s somewhat funny when Dayron Domínguez Piedra is passed around in hands by the ensemble lying on the floor while he drunkenly complains that he’s had too much piña colada.

The German cultural asset Pina Bausch, an international “export hit”, is treated here just as disrespectfully as German show business treated black culture and clichés. In the old Federal Republic, black artists were exoticized, marketed as others and as carriers of often very simple, if not racist, messages. The ensemble later drags banana crates onto the stage and sings “Samba sí, Arbeit no”. The rather rough treatment of Pina Bausch’s art can be understood as a kind of retaliation.

Next performances: September 20th and 21st www.hebbel-am-ufer.de

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