A black girl and a black boy in pumps that are much too big, step onto the stage of the Maxim-Gorki-Theater in Berlin. They take turns turning their backs on each other and stalking each other from behind. Clack, clack, clack, a tap on the shoulder, a startled scream. It’s a strange, ominous game that anticipates all of the tragedy and poetry of the nearly two-hour performance.
The adaptation of Olivia Wenzel’s auto-fiction “1000 Serpentinen Angst” is shown, which tells of the growing up of a young woman who was born shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall and, with her twin brother, is the only black person around. The father returned to Angola early, and the mother, who has fought against her lack of freedom since puberty, only sporadically there for the children. Now the daughter wants to work through the hard biographical breaks in order to better understand who she is.
Suddenly a man roars and raises his outstretched arm towards the sky
In her staging, Anta Helena Recke has placed this fragmentary narrative consisting of scraps of memory in the context of a family constellation. So you not only get to know the first-person narrator, who reports subjectively from her past, but also numerous substitute figures: the maternal old punk, the father who wears creased trousers, the best friend in a boyfriend blazer. The stage: photo album and flickering picture tube in one.
Role prose, heated dialogues, small scenes, dance interludes and detailed picture descriptions alternate at breakneck speed and jump from one key experience to the next. One day the first-person narrator is sitting on the platform with her twin brother and is waiting for the train, when a man suddenly roars and raises his outstretched arm towards the sky.
There are always moments like these that catch you cold. One had just been happy about the half self-deprecating, half cynical comment on the “Interracial Gangbang” or about the baggy outfit with the childishly painted breasts. It takes a moment to realize that it is the same unpredictability that racism victims live with on a daily basis.
Olivia Wenzel and Anta Helena Recke know what they are talking about. You are black yourself and are pretty trendy in the local cultural scene right now. Wenzel’s novel was on the longlist of the German Book Prize last year, Recke, born in 1989, has already been invited twice to the Berlin Theatertreffen despite her young age. The choreographer Joana Tischkau, who is considered a shooting star in the independent scene, also took part in the production.
It’s hard to see how this hip cosmopolitan hacks at her mentally unstable mother
Tischkau has developed a suitable dance style for each generation in the performance, sometimes wild fidgeting to guitar riffs, sometimes step sequences to hip-hop beats. Shari Asha Crosson, who has most of the speech that evening, plays the first-person narrator as a defiant woman, to whom the sympathies must first develop. Because before you find out how much she was neglected as a child, it can be difficult to endure the way this hip cosmopolitan, who eloquently debates cultural appropriation and neocolonialism, picks up on her mentally unstable mother, who is by no means so academic. She drifts on the lake like a “fat jellyfish”, she complains at one point.
In the course of the evening, the first-person narrator reflects on her own privileges and develops more and more empathy for the difficulties of her ancestors, which are mixed up with major historical events. “What would I give for meeting my grandmother and mother at an impossible time when we would all be 15 years old,” she says. And because something like this is possible in the theater, suddenly three girls appear who couldn’t be more different and begin to tentatively dance together.