At some point Ansgar is desperate. “We’re the good guys!” He shouts. If you hadn’t already learned a bit about Ansgar, you’d believe him immediately, the way he looks in his yellow hippie clothes. Usually he also hops around a bit, draws sunny circles with his arms and speaks the “Chakra” so beautifully Swabian that one would voluntarily search for his energy center. Alone: Ansgar, the esotericist and Waldorf teacher, adheres to a conspiracy theory. And then it is no longer so unproblematic with “the good guys”.
Sebastian Gerasch is this Ansgar in Christiane Mudra’s “The Key”, which is currently in the Luise cultural center can be seen in Ruppertstrasse. Mudra is responsible for the concept, research, text and direction. And as in her previous works – such as the urban space game about right-wing extremism “No Claimant” or the evening about violence against women “The Holy Bitch” – Mudra is dedicated to a socio-politically relevant topic. She puts the whole thing under the term “investigative theater”: She researches, relies on original sources and then uses the means of theater or digital media to share her results.
The audience can vote on very different questions
So this time it’s about conspiracy theories, their modes of action, often anti-Semitic roots and motives. The two supporters of the fictional conspiracy movement “The Key” Ansgar and Jo (Murali Perumal) as well as the head of the group, Dr. Ki (Stefan Lehnen) lead through the evening, which is staged as a kind of membership recruitment meeting. The audience shouldn’t be too passive here, facts should not only be consumed but also processed. The audience can vote again and again. About who it trusts, what needs it has, whether the earth is round. It’s kind of like a little self-test of how accessible you are to even dubious doubts.
That’s a good idea. Because what Mudra has compiled is probably even more extensive than the material in the recently broadcast ARD political magazine “Contrasts”. And no matter in how many different formats – as a film, as the words of an artificial intelligence, as key fob slogans – it presents it on stage: The density is extremely high, data follows statistics and research results. Without the vote and Ansgar, the sun child, it could be a dry theory, numbers don’t turn into poetry on stage either. Nevertheless: The evening is important, you see that again and again when you look at the voting results. Because even there one often doubts the belief that is too self-evident: “We are the good guys!”