HER FACE – A Shared Womb 共享的子宫  Theatre about diasporic poetry, disappearance and hauntological reoccurrence.  By Paper Tiger

Are we the same, are we different? Where is our Common Ground? Welcome to the Safe Space of the Rote Remise.

This is the fifth episode of the series Her Face. Artist and performer Micha Stella transforms her Berlin flat into an intra-social womb. In an audiovisual installation, the audience experiences Common ground as a common origin. A personal and social genesis.

Micha Stella picked No. 1 from the Text Box of Her Face, which reveals to be “Windrose” by Susanne Göße. She read the cultural narrative attributed to difference. Anyone’s life has been decisively defined. Evolution becomes political: gender, race, nation, big/small, psychological disposition, class… various differences promote Micha Stella’s reflection on the shared and common, just the opposite direction and a lasting belief for her work and her life.

Thus on this Saturday evening, in addition to the immediate physical experience of non-verbal grounding, philosophical questions are raised in the performance. Are equality or difference simply mental concepts? Any distinction has to be introduced into the world. There is no fixed world that is independent of an observer. Everything that ‘exists’ is only what observers observe. Is difference, too, to be understood only as difference, as a distinction between difference and identity? In the Genesis world only emerges through the first distinction between day and night; the human being who learns to distinguish – is driven out of the wombly paradise.

In a Simulative Birth Process Stella releases the audience into the backyard of her house. From there, they embark on another journey through time and space with Stella. They meet artists, musicians, dancers in their flats. The audience experiences the potential of the Rote Remise. The building as a ‘social womb’ gives birth to the possibilities of the existing (free) space. The focus is on questions of “community” and its boundaries, creating space for encounters and collaborations between people with very different backgrounds. The space of differentiation becomes common ground again. A place of social warmth, a shared knowledge space.

Performer: Micha Stella / Marco Colocci/ Matilda Flor Usinger/ Laurent Jeanneau/ Jonathan Applebaum/

Her Face
Theatre about diasporic poetry, disappearance and hauntological reoccurrence

‘My death will be mine alone. Once one passes the door, one cannot transfer even any experience at all to others. (Auch mein Tod wird allein meiner sein, ich kann ihn nicht abgeben oder austauschen; ist die Schwelle einmal überschritten, kann ich nicht einmal mehr irgendeine Erfahrung davon anderen vermitteln.)‘ (Susanne Gösse). How can the untransferable dreams and myths be celebrated again, when ‘death’ interrupts the game of ‘life’? Endless piles of paper rise, as do endless fragments of words and luminescent poetry. The act of ‘translating’ produces linguistic friction, as well as bled wounds. There opens a fugitive path where German, Chinese and more languages are connected, ‘on a merry-go-round of tortured and bleeding words’, producing delirium and joy of disorientation.

‘Where is the mother tongue? It is with us, it is like us, it is our finger, it is our face to the world (Zhang Zao).’ ‘Her face’ is a face that has gone through multilingual and polyphonic surgery. The frame shatters, the portrait collapses, and mercury cascades on the floor, into individual rooms and households in this Berlin winter. The linguistic rubbles of poetry that have remained restless enter the rooms as if exiled. ‘All doors open. All doors close’ …

In this performance series, situations will contextualise each other and resonate with each other, exposing and concealing the inherent ‘theatre’ mechanism in the topography of everyday urban life. A mixture of nonfictional and fictional: private alchemy, family events, bathtub ballet, culinary eroticism, pensive reading, private parade, paranormal solo concert, toxic imaginary autobiography, etc. All stories depart from the texts left behind by a Berlin resident. The series collect fragments of poetry by Hölderlin, Celan and the Chinese exile poet Zhang Zao, who lived in Tübingen, thereafter gifted them – to eight families in Berlin, to the kitchens, bedrooms, living rooms and bathrooms. Eight or more homes will be transformed temporarily into theatre. The coming spring, these theatre situations will be collected and sculpted into the ruined walls of the ‘adjacent’ Zeithof (Wasserspeicher).

This is another transcultural performance project by Paper Tiger and Kunstrbetrieb Birach on the free theatre scene, in the aftermath of the pandemic. ‘Theatre’ will wander as an exiled spectre between the urban, historical and cultural spaces of Otherness. Celan once described, one / bowstring / spreads its pain among you (die Eine / Sehne / spannt ihren Schmerz unter euch).

Schedule

        1. Cloud Tongues  12.11.2022

        2. No One’s Rose  03.12.2022

        3. Sustainability Cat 18.12.2022

        4. A Get-together 8.1.2023

        5. A Shared Womb 14.1.2023

        6. 10.2.2023

        7. 11.2.2023

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https://www.papertigertheater.com/herface
https://www.papertigertheater.com/sharedwomb