The Munich Kammerspiele are the last of the three straight theaters to start the new season. With the one-hour evening “La mer sombre”, staged by Pinar Karabulut in the small workroom of the Kammerspiele, a collage of texts by Claude Cahun. That only seems like a teaser for what is to come, the actual opening premiere will not follow until October 7th in the big house, Corona is to blame for this, the virus torpedoed the preliminary rehearsals in summer. Consequently, one should not derive anything programmatic from the stumbling beginning. Except for the content.
Claude Cahun was born in Nantes in 1894, died in 1954 in Jersey, where she was active in the resistance after the Nazi occupation together with her stepsister and partner Suzanne Malherbe, was arrested and broke up. She was a writer and photographer, even overwhelmed the members of the Surrealist circle in Paris, in which she moved. In France, England and also the USA, precisely because of her photographic work, she is received as an early icon of a gender-fluid will to expression. “Neuter is the only gender that always corresponds to me”, wrote Claude Cahun in her autobiographical story “Aveux non avenus” in 1930. While the Surrealists were also concerned with transcending the categories of male and female, artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray approached it in a joking manner rather than with Cahun’s dark, escapist earnestness.
The author is regarded as an early icon of gender-fluid expression
The Kammerspiele thus remain stubbornly on the course of discourse, in “La mer sombre” – “The Dark Sea” – albeit in a feather-light and also enigmatic way. Magnus Chrapkowski translated Cahun’s texts into German for the first time for the evening, anticipating a book edition, which will begin in October with “Heroines”, Cahun’s renditions of female figures from myth and literature. Using excerpts from “Aveux non avenus” (“Void Confessions”) and “Vues et Visions” (“Views and Visions”), Pınar Karabulut and the three players built a textual kaleidoscope of questions without answers, of attitudes, feelings, from many thoughts about what that could be, this thing called identity. The texts suit her nonchalantly sensuous way of staging well, the evening lets you immerse yourself in a foam of the night, but it remains shimmeringly cheerful, also because Cahun, herself certainly shaken by the search for herself, expresses a peculiar cheerfulness in her texts, a possesses indignation without any laziness. “Where are you going?” asks Thomas Hauser. “I’m going to break through heteronormative principles of order using subversive techniques,” answers Gro Swantje Kohlhof.
First of all, Karabulut lets Hauser, Kohlhof and Christian Löber sing and speak among the audience, then they examine the stage, a colorful structure made of a mirrored floor, pink shells, a flashing plush heart and a bubble bath. Karabulut has a great weakness for colorful, retro-futuristic design, the players wear platform trekking sandals and gender-neutral wigs, the music by Daniel Murena wanders around in electronic realms. This evening is not aimed at sustainability, but rather at what the three of them do on stage, lying in the bathtub together. Unfortunately, you can’t do that as a spectator, but you can surrender to the dark sea like a fluid state that lasts an hour and then is over again.