Berlin Theatertreffen – Roman »Bloodbook«: Nightmare Family

The Großer Sea stares into the audience with a growing face. Arthritis ranks around their hands like a thorn hedge. “Why are you never there?” She hurls the viewer and her grandchild. The grandmother, in the Bern Bern German Grand Sea, is the defining figure in childhood by Kim de l’Horizon. Everything revolves around the old woman, but she herself looks colorless in her beige cardigan and thick white tights next to the colorful costumes of the others.

The memorial pictures drive forward like alluvial goods and shimmer black and white on the floor-length thread curtain: her mouth as insatiable throat, in which she swings the still hot cunt cuts, the big hands that threaten to pack the child, and her truckli. As a souvenir of travel, you exhibit the old woman’s wealth achieved, but in itself the chests are only emptied, which causes the child’s discomfort.

Jan Friedrich »Bloodbook« staged close to the novel in the Magdeburg Theater. Now the production can be seen at the Berlin Theater Meeting. In the autofictional examination of the gender fluid author, childhood distorts itself to terrible fairy tale images, almost as a burden a curse on the matrilinear ancestors. The Grand Sea, described as a monster, inherited fear and hardness to the child’s sea, which, like the Disney Hexe Maleficent, appears. Two blue horns grow out of her head and her heart threatens to freeze to ice if the chubby child would not breathe some warmth with tender spells. The father only appears as an empty space. His face hides a paper bag, from which a smiley starles into the rubble of family life.

The past and the present of the told overlap in the stage structure of Alexandre Corazzola. On a podium is the urban room into which the narrative person fled to Zurich, while childhood rumors in the basement underneath and only visible with cameras. The recordings dismember the bodies and transform family trauma into a surreal body horror, in which tongues are cut off with the bag knife and discover fingers. Between curses and horror fantasies, the child played by Carmen Steinert crawled around on knees, looking for a body, a gender and a language that belong to him.

The desire to make yourself and others a thing accompanies the protagonist down to sex life. In the big city there is a transformation to the “Dolce-Gabbana Gay” with Bubble Butt. He lives after a simple equation: more muscles and low body fat percentage result in greater fucking. Not only the desire for control accompanies the adolescents, but also racist stereotypes of the grandmother appear again in the desire.

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Just because exoticating masculinity is theoretically rejected does not disappear into the imagination. In a cross-border scene, the main figure reduces a party fly racist in a military role-playing game. “We want your bodies, but we don’t want you,” she reflects later. She is not only a victim, but also perpetrators of her circumstances and does not manage to free herself from racism and objectification through pure deconstruction.

The problematic legacy cannot be simply stripped off. It is deeply rooted like the beech in front of the family house. Planted at the birth of the Groß Sea, the tree becomes an allegory for the Family Fate Community. It was no coincidence that the great -grandfather decided for this tree. Kim de L’Horizon reconstructs how the National Socialist landscape architect Heinrich Wiepking popularized the beech with blood-and-soil ideology. The great -grandfather was not a National Socialist, but it was certainly a nationalist.

In the staging at the Magdeburg Theater, descent appears in all its strenuous, unpleasant and unsatisfactory dimensions. Immersed in the magical thinking of the child, it becomes a fairytale puzzle as to whether it can be used to deal with this inheritance. The only thing left between witches, speaking trees and potions is to work through the pain, shame and guilt, as Kim de l’orizon in the language and Jan Friedrich succeeded in his shrill, urgent pictures.

Presentations at the theater meeting: 3rd and 4.5.
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