Mauern

The performance collective She She Pop will be joined by guests who were partly raised in socialist East Germany and partly in the capitalist West on a series of time travel between moments of the past and possible futures. Their journey proceeds along walls that pervade the perception and emotional shape of their joint past: torn-down walls, walls that still exist today, that only seem to have been overcome – and walls that have been newly erected. From a rubble heap of documentary material and with the help of cultural techniques that invoke the future, the stage becomes a time capsule, taking the women to historic moments and allowing them to speculate about different presents and futures.

For their project „Mauern“, She She Pop explore 20th century feminist science fiction literature. The novels written by Marge Piercy, Octavia Butler or Ursula K. Le Guin in the 1970s present very specific connections between what is past, what is present and what is in the future. They describe women who are very much connected to their time with regards to their politics, but who transcend them in one way or another. They use contemporary political knowledge and sensibilities to look into other times from this specific present vantage point.

The collective searches for lost models for the future in documents and memories of the past, for utopian dreams that may yet be salvaged, that can still be saved. The challenge is to find an artful way out of the ubiquitous present and its broken dreams.

She She Pop are a performance collective whose members are predominantly women. Integrating their own biography into the pieces is always the method of the work and not its purpose. This generates a form of theatre that is committed to experiment. The stage is always a place of the acutely public realm. A place where decisions are made, ways of conversing and social systems are tried out, speech gestures and social rituals are rehearsed or discarded. The group sees their task in the search for the social limitations of communication – and in their pointed and artful transgression in the protected space of the theatre.

Schauspiel Leipzig is a long-standing coproduction partner of She She Pop. “ORATORIO. A collective meditation on a well-kept secret” was invited to the 2019 Berlin Theatertreffen.

www.sheshepop.de