Two more plays, and the beginning of Berlin Adventures

Oh boy, so many happenings in these my last few weeks in Berlin. Two crazy Pollesch plays, and such and so on and such, but it's too much even for me to explain adequately, so I guess I'll start with the two plays I saw, and then move on to my adventures across Berlin.

Soooo

Darwin-win and Martin Loser Drag-King and Hygiene Auf Tauris

First of all Pollesch, WTF? Ok. Now I'm just confused. This piece was typical Volksbühne fare. Plenty of theory and completely incoherent text and then of course the usual theatrical madnesses. I've seen so much of it that by now it has become endearing. Quite the feat I must say. The stage is very much a Pollesch stage, what does that mean? There are the usual flat elements of a kitchen in fake paper and then of course a place for characters to smoke a cigarette and talk. Basically what we are seeing is the backstage of the other show. Diktatorregattinen I, which I saw the next day.

This piece, unlike Tod Eines Praktikanten which was about commericalization, and Cappucetto Rosso which was about theatre and the political edge, this piece was about Evolution, and Darwin and science.

The first moments of the piece we have one of the characters in a leatherjacket and oscar wilde on his shirt start talking really fast and lecturing to us. He gets more and more caught up in what he is saying until finally he bursts and just starts shifting the podium with more madness until it crashes and a piece of wood actually comes off. There is a bit of talking from the other characters but soon, instead a ballet. And we have beautiful dancing from two of th main characters, a man in what looks like a flight suit and a drag king in a ballet outfit, and another drag king in jogging pants and a muscle shirt. She is the one who takes out that dancing streamer thing, I dont know how to describe it theres a word for that thing that the dancer holds in their hand and its like a flying ribbon with them? You see it alot in the olympics.

Like el Perro Cubano, Pollesch takes advantage of the fact that we are staring right into an empty house. The theatre becomes almost like a forest, with some characters becoming animals, spoken to on camera, and some others become television reporters studying them, one other becomes a jaded character merely looking on. There is an incredible amount of versatility.

It gets exhausting sometimes articulating every single detail of these shows but some dont escape ones mind even if one tries. Pollesch's theatre hopefully averages one or two of thes emoments, and this piece certainly had them.

So we have the guy pretty much rattling on and on about evolution, when all of a sudden he takes an egg out to make a point. He cracks it and lets the white fall into the bowl and then lets the yolk dance a bit on his skin, as to make the point that the yolk itself is still alive. I dont know whether this was a rag on antiabortionists, or satirizing nature study, but what happened next was pure madness.

Basically every character took this idea to heart and began cracking eggs, removing the whites and playing with the yolk, until it unceremoniously ended up broken spread otu on their bodies. We had deliciously kitschy music to go along with this moment as the characters tried everything. One of the actors had his shirt off and was letting it dance on his belly, two others were trying to pass it from one body to the other, with varying results. The man who had it on his belly had somehow gotten it all the way to his eye, and we all gaped in awe and hilarity as he then attempted to get it off his eye and ended up spreading it all over his neck.

When it was over the characters were covered in dried yellow yoke and I had witnessed yet another challenge (is it really?) to the theatre.

Amogn other things the piece had was video (17-0?) and mics. Oh my oh me. There was a point where one of the characters was trying to convince a bunch of penguins on screen, to go the other way, to disobey their instincts.

Phew, it's exhausting to write so much, especially after a day of museums.

another image, woman dressed as man dresses herself up as this fabric sheeted angel, really beautiful moment actually.

The last image that bears mentioning is the last image of the piece, which amounted to this bizarre huge sort of thin cloth beast, that eventually devoured each one of the characters until they were all moving and squirming, getting through the door and coming towards us. Then the piece ended. Bravo, Pollesch. You crazy fucker.

....


Saturday night was Berghain. Now I couldn't feasibly go to Berlin without visiting this club, capital of debauchery in industrial Friedrichshain, right by the formidable Ostbanhof train station. The whole act of even getting in was a challenge. I was with a friend of mine who had already been there various times, so getting in for us was not as hard as for all the poor souls I would see every 5 minutes turned away. We waited for 40 minutes, which for Berghain is nothing. This is because we got there early, and by early I mean 200 am. Dont be the poor fool who makes the mistake of showing up at 4 because you will be in line for at least 2 hours.

The main man at the door, who wears some bizarre sort of jawring and stands as a hulking beast at the entrance of club-inferno is actually an incredibly established and well off artist. He technically does not need to be working the club, but continues to do so out of a sense of duty, his discerning taste keeping the lameos out and those who are apparently "cool" enough in. Whatever.

Well we got in and after that excitement passed my friend Ayman showed me all the workings of this place that is so debaucherous cameras are expressly forbidden and must be checked at the entrance.

Oh man, now this was techno central. The way up to the first dance floor is this sort of factory like stair, that when you reach the top you get to the huge darkly lit room, this building used to be a train station, with a serious soundsystem and hard techno. Every now and then a fog machine would pump up smoke and the strobes would sound.

The top floor was the "softer" techno, and it was populated with more touristy fare and english could be heard more than german, though that was the case in most of the bar.

In the end the dancing was fun, techno is the sort of thing anyone can dance to anyway they please and you wont ever be judged too harshly for it...and we left the club at 9 am, which for Berghain, is early. Some other friends of ours who happened to be there left at 2 pm.

Truth be told I'm not truly the clubbing type and though Berghain was an exciting and memorable experience, it wont be the type of thing I'll find myself missing too much, or suddenly craving, the way I will the theatres.

....

to be honest, I'm trying to figure out how to describe the next Pollesch show, but so much of it, so much of it went over not just my head, but a german friend of mine who understood a bit more than me, but not so much as to really let me know. Maybe one day I'll return and give Dikatorregattinen the airy mystique and justified review it deserves. But for now, I'll leave it to your imagination:

3 women dressed the same way. Two of them are the same person or dopplegangers of each other. We're not sure if its a famous opera singer or the wife of a Romanian dictator. The only male in the cast is dressed in a powder blue dictators uniform, but all the time his only lines are I want to be an actress! And I only get these few lines I want more lines! He plays the daughter of the 2? women.

Add to that, guns. And something involving mirrors. And a video camera, and a huge chandelier that doubles as a disco ball.

There. Thats all you get.

................

Well, with that ended what was my haupt (main) phase in berlin....the next few days were spent getting to know the city more closely, travelling to places I havent been to, seeing museums I should see, and really making sure I dont miss anything too unmissable.

Monday all the museums were closed, so I made my way to Mitte to explore a bit more of the interesting areas. I looked around the Nikolaiviertel which showed a bit of old berlin, and though it was old it was no less grandiose, replete with very formidable looking buildings and a modest avenues. It must have been quite the city then as well.

I passed the ruins of a small church, bombed out during the war. That is quite an interesting relic of berlin, since most of it has been completely rebuilt it is only really in churches where you see the pain of war - in these spaces that used to hold or claimed to hold God that opened violently with the hand of man now stand as empty containers of an absent god? Or is it that now they contain the divine more than ever, since in their incompleteness they retain some hidden element that had evaded them when they once had structure?

I kept on wandering and ended up in the back of an alexander platz shopping mall. I kept walking not really paying attention where I was going and somehow ended up in Friedrichshain. It was dull and depressing soviet style housing. A really interesting experience though seeing this part of Berlin, built up with unattractive GDR era architecture. Whose faded dreams of a different sort of grandeur now bear frightening reminders of the extremes of modernity. I crossed over these prisonlike avenues into Kreuzberg, and ended up incidentally in another bombed out church.

This was a particularly strong one since the angel that stayed atop, commanding a white hot angry gaze stared right at the sight of the old wall.

I ended up walking a bit more to this sort of built in reservoir and got to one of Kreuzberg's old centers, Oranien Strasse. It was lovely, large amounts of turkish immigrants and the smell of delicious food coupled with trendy bars and berliner yuppies.

I decided to keep my adventure going and trekked over to the other side of Kreuzberg to see the area around Bergman strasse. It was one of the most picturesque parts of Berlin, and that was very much true. The streets have an absolutely timeless feel, and for many one could even imagine Europe. The people were like Prenzlbergers but a bit "trendier", not as many tourists and many families. A lovely area bordered by Victoriapark, another breathtaking Belin park replete with a fake waterfall and a huge impressive green. Lovely.

I ended up again somehow in Schönberg, and bored of residential housing I went back home to the cafe across the street and wrote another scene of my play.

So much more to tell but UBU starts in 20 minutes and I must go!

Tschüss!

- J