Volksbühne Berlin – real pain and false shit

Florentina Holzinger is back with a new production at the Berlin Volksbühne on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. Holzinger’s celebrated performances are the hot shit on the theater stages in Europe. If someone is pulling a new, young audience into the halls, then it is. Everyone and everyone must have seen at least once what they put on the audience. In any case, she is never embarrassed for a scandal: sex and blood, loud and bright, that is the staging strategy.

“A Year Without Summer” also undermines all expectations from the first scene: a performer steps on the stage – and is completely dressed. Soon a good dozen other women will add, all of them also attracted them. Everyone knows whether die-hard fan or theater visitor with a virgin look: If you get a card for a woodener evening-difficult enough! -, he can also show two hours of bare bodies.

This time it gets gentle on the business. First of all, the constructed framework is presented to us. It is reminded of 1816, the title -giving “year without summer” when a volcanic eruption darkened the sky. The cold months in the middle of the year spent the 18 -year -old Mary Shelley on Lake Geneva. There they searched for community in inhospitable times. With scary stories you stayed happy. According to the myth, the idea of ​​Shelley’s novel about Doctor Frankenstein and the monster he created by him was created, this “modern Prometheus”.

And now, it wants the scenic arrangement for this evening, we imagine that the year 2025 would be without summer. Are we able to take shared measures, such as they took on Shelley and others, at all? What scary stories entertain us, how does Frankenstein’s monster look two centuries later?

The performers find together on stage, dance, nestle together. It doesn’t take long and the familiar sight of bare bodies on stage shows us again. Everything as always on the planet Holzinger. Then it is licked and fingered, pushed and grated, sought by partners or eagerly observed. No hurry dominates the action. The scene runs in length, and soon you think you have really seen everything.

The horror à la Frankenstein will soon appear. Holzinger has given her new number revue the shape of a musical. Everything is full and very ironic, clear. But now the audience has to go through. It is dilated and danced diligently, there is a smile of genre. Ultimately, she makes it a principle of how she had already decided her last full -length staging »Sancta«.

And otherwise? An oversized air -filled doll, Gustave Courbet’s model for his famous painting “The origin of the world”, modeled the stage. The actresses storm back onto the scene from their step. Stories from your own life are told. Seam death, medication, illness are the topics. Joseph Mengele comes into a theatrical competition with the naturalist Georges Cuvier, one of the pioneers of racial theories. A mucus battle is shown. Blood should not be missing, of course in a large recording. A performer is pierced live in brows and cheeks and soon lifted up through the air on these piercings. And it also gets cute: a group of robot dogs lists a little dance.

However, the highlight of the spectacle begins in the hospital. The older actresses experience their medical care here. The diapers that are surrounded are quickly filled. Art shit, an old ingredient from Holzinger’s work, is extensively used here. This time, the smell was used. If everything just went into the diaper, the shit soon runs everywhere and from every ass. The toilets literally run over. Those who can do it can be happy about the show of such performances. The fountain -like effusions are not only a little infantile.

In a memorable scene we meet Sigmund Freud, this old white man, who is theatrically done by Holzinger and her crew. In his grotesque representation, exuberant the Nazi doctor Mengele, he is introduced to us as a laughing women’s enemy. Only once the word “Penisneid” has to be spoken on stage, and the laughs in the audience are a sure thing.

Holzinger’s work is a continuous examination of trauma, pain and displacement, the struggle with the unconscious, gender struggle. But she does not want to know her productions that she sees as feminist art. Her feminism does not need theoretical foundation, she seems to tell us. And so she always presents us again and again, show wounds and yet wants to believe in something that Freud did not simply think that as possible: healing. Healing through self -authorization is offered to us; It looks like a nice lie that we know from Mary Shelley’s century theater.

Anyone who saw the last big work of Florentina Holzinger could be curious to see how things would go. Naked bodies, open wounds, more and more stage agents, always shrill tones. How long should and can something like that continue? Is Holzinger, who is currently the hottest theater director, a victim of her own role, trapped in expectations and counter expectations?

With “A Year Without Summer”, despite all the continuities in the choice of funds, she already finds a different access. The pace is visibly throttled, which does not reduce the tension, but on the contrary. The crazy overwhelming dramaturgy of the last productions, in which an increase had to follow every spectacular number, has been canceled. Holzinger shows again what she really masters: bring whole big pictures on stage, arrange scenes.

With Florentina Holzinger, the impression was often given enough, the punk is back in the theater. Don’t be afraid of bad taste, evil words, bare bodies. But appearance is deceptive. There is a lot of hippietum in need of harmony behind the punk attitude. She had already collected money for tree on stage or sang queer measuring. Your theater is always a mixture of circus, porn cinema and scout camp.

This time her criticism meets Doctor Frankenstein’s latest monster. Certainly not wrong. And then the unity of life and death becomes harmony. In the end, peace always stands with everything. Empowerment as a consciousness work is enough for her. “Death is a mistake,” Heiner Müller once postulated, but he too is just an old white man.

Next performances: May 24, 25. and 7.6.

www.volksbuehne.berlin