Reviews of the premiere, May 2015

The fact that resorting to Brechtian approaches in this very funny, never boring 120-minute production doesn’t feel outdated at all is one of the many surprises of this evening. Asking questions, very simple questions, repeating these questions, demanding explanations and changes and thus blurring the boundaries between illusion and reality – this comes across very fresh on stage, never half-baked or overly theoretical. The actors as well as the alleged invisible workers come across very well on stage. The collective consisting of independent theater makers, the ensemble and the theater’s employees did all of the work in creating this evening examining the working conditions of theater.
Dorothee Schöpfer, Stuttgarter-Zeitung, 14.05.2015

They visited Schauspiel Stuttgart over and over for more than a year in order to artistically survey this behemoth: meetings, interviews, workshops as well as negotiations determining who would be paid what if they are not one of the actors who appear on stage. The performance group documented the process in a collection of loose sheets of paper that they provided to the audience as a program. (…) Documents reflect the various stages of the development process: from the funding application to Germany’s Federal Cultural Foundation to concept statements to emails with the participants. The audience learns that one or another participant actually wanted to leave the project and that the attempt to bring theater employees from the workshops on stage lead to large organizational entanglements – because life backstage also means a life with a working time account, overtime and deficit hours. The fact that technicians and artisans also end up standing on stage at the end of the day speaks of the success of She She Pop’s persuasive efforts but is most of all a boon for the production.
Kristin Becker, Theater Heute 07/2015

On Sunday, the nationally celebrated theater group She She Pop invigorated Schwankhalle Bremen with their virtuously independent theatrical craftspersonship. An allusion-rich piece of discursive theater, where everything is full of significance and rather funny. Sven Garbade, Weser-Kurier, 14.09.2015

“Ende” – is the title of this fantastic new piece by She She Pop, now running at the co-producing venue FFT after premiering in Berlin. The story of creation – seven days, light and darkness – is what three women and a man use to hold their production together. They search of the end of the beginning. This is sometimes witty, self-deprecating, sometimes ironic and laconic, very inventive and always to the point. The way, in which they play with theatrical means, perform them and simultaneously allow them to take effect, is great art. Femininity is a hard currency. Only no one has the time to find out, who profits from it”, says Papatheodorou. Meanwhile, Lisa Lucassen slaves away at Meat Loaf’s album “Bat Out of Hell”. Music, which she heard once too often sitting in front of her brother’s record player. She sings the seven songs one after another and then checks them off a list. “It’s not always nice”, she says. But it is highly entertaining the way she interprets the oozing pathos of these heaven and hell songs with no more than a ukulele. And then there is God aka Mieke Matzke, who attempts to recreate some form of order out of the chaos, the “primordial soup” of duct tape, paper, coat hangers, trash bags, apples and water crates spread across the stage. A touching and deeply human struggle.
Marion Troja, Westdeutsche Zeitung, 25.01.2014

Reviews of the premiere 2013

…That is what this intelligent piece of art is about: It does not celebrate the act of creation, the allegedly genuine and positive challenge of man. It is about the moment after. What happens when something is brought to the world – but will not disappear from it anymore? One thinks of the concept of money or the invention of plastic. Creations that will probably never find an ending. To create something, She She Pop say, is not only an achievement. It is also a responsibility. An idea one should think about more often. Not only in art.
Andrea Heinz, DIE ZEIT, 17.10.2013

…a subtle composition of everyday life and existential moments, the biografical and the fundamental, earnest and wit, humor and pessimism…
Elisabeth Nehring, Deutschlandradio, 08.10.2013

And thus, we come to the She She Pop charm of the evening: the flying splice of the four performers between private person and the performer personality, between ego trip and parlor game.
Sophie Diesselhorst, nachtkritik.de, 08.10.2013

THE RITE OF SPRING as performed by She She Pop and their mothers at Short Theatre Festival 2015 Rom

TV report at 3Sat (in German)

From a post-feminist perspective, it may seem like a banal or even obsolete claim to say that that women are not only victims of male violence, which incidentally plays no role here, but also of their own sacrifices. From the very outset, the fact that, on the surface, She She Pop has simply staged a new, highly unusual interpretation of Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre Du Printemps lifts the project out of the private sphere and into the abstract. Music, even when it is as programmatic as in Stravinsky’s case, eludes the context of linguistic meaning. (…) But the fact that The Rite of Spring is not staged family therapy should not be levelled at it as a criticism. On the contrary, it expresses in a highly precise way – by equally ranking linguistic and non-verbal, technical and musical media – the multilayered female identity along the spectrum of autonomy and sacrifice (or, for those that find that too melodramatic: the renunciation of chances for personal growth). The Rite of Spring is much more than a therapeutic group session. This is fortunate, and also aesthetically pleasing.
Bettina Schulte, Badische Zeitung, 28.06.2014

Of course, there is a temptation to compare The Rite of Spring with Testament. The most noticeable difference is the more direct – and therefore more dramatically rewarding – style of Testament, a play about their fathers. But that is precisely the strength of this play about their mothers: it is at its most eloquent when things remain up in the air. When what is not going to be said is said. But without words. Women and their bodies might seem like a hackneyed subject. But dance is a form of expression from bygone times, when things were either criticised or never criticised. When Mother sabotaged every family get-together with her bad mood. When unsaid expectations hung in the air. With this play, in which the four mothers are not present on stage themselves, but are projected on screens in video recordings instead, the audience has to fill in the gaps with its own ideas. And once again, She She Pop manages to steer clear of clichés; to be radical without over-simplifying. The Rite of Spring is not a tribunal but, well, a declaration of love. At the end we are not confronted with death, as in Stravinsky’s version, but with reconciliation.
Regula Frevler, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), 15.06.2014

There is still much talk on stage, even if much less than in Testament. The collective has put its private material through the shredder of indirect speech to conceal any exact correlations –only to wheel out all the contradictions: children averse to cuddling, mothers whose love is smothering, the childish desire for closeness, smashed doors, conversation breakdowns, competition, distance that is won and endured at great effort – and the guilty paradox that your own artistic feminist work may have been made possible by your mother sacrificing her own interests. “We don’t want to talk about the presence of these women being at least as important as their absence. Or that we want to be close without talking to them.” So the bodies gain centre stage instead: the genesis of the intensive – and tense – relationship between mother and child is, after all, the physical connection, and, in the case of mothers and daughters, identification is added into the mix. She She Pop plays visually on these childish identifications: the daughters on stage imitate the screen mothers’ improvised dances, and video portraits of the children are superimposed onto those of the mothers, merging into each other and showing astonishing resemblances. Sebastian Bark regresses to a babe in arms at his mother’s breast – a horrifying image. And the mothers join in, huddling like medicine women in their blankets and capes, sometimes miming the part of devouring monsters, without vanity and with a sense of humour. And sometimes with the strange, jerky and touching – albeit completely un-esoteric – ritual with which She She Pop celebrates Stravinsky, complete with a flashing crown with the word “Victim”, lint removers and vacuum cleaners. Utopia as a cautious meeting place for mothers and children – with as much frankness as possible, and as much distance as necessary.
Eva Behrendt, Theater Heute, June 2014

After its world premiere in Berlin, “The Rite of Spring” as performed by She She Pop and their mothers now has come to Frankfurt for no more than two completely sold-out performances at the Frankfurter Mousonturm – we can only hope that the piece will be shown there again in the near future. Not that mothers and children of all ages are presented with a pseudo-artistic systemic family constellation. No – “The Rite of Spring” may at first appear to be as much, but it was not quite as simple and easy for She She Pop, when they put their own fathers on stage in the celebrated production “Testament” four years ago: discussing love and the contracts between the generations against the backdrop of Shakespeare’s “Lear”. The group, who has been working together for 15 years, have not simply produced a cover version for their mothers, but continued their train of thought. Among other things, they reflect that it may be easier to perform with fathers, rather than discover things about mothers. Reservations, limitations and difficulties are laid bare: the fact that mothers and children often use to same words to speak about completely different things. What does it mean when a mother wishes her daughter were “emancipated”? What should a daughter think of a mother, who has been married for 45 years, but has no idea about the family finances? What does “sacrifice” mean for the mother generation, born during the war, and what do mothers and the children understand by suffering, dignity, appreciation and freedom? She She Pop have found a new, clever way to negotiate the issues of mother-child relationships and self-images. The audience faces four brightly patterned screens on which the four mothers of Sebastian Bark, Johanna Freiburg, Ilia Papatheodorou and Berit Stumpf soon appear in images and on film. Right from the start, we therefore have here mother images in a dual sense – images that both performers and spectators must deal with. And right from the beginning, She She Pop also resort to an equally dual theme. The subject of “sacrifice” by women and mothers, which plays such a major role in feminist literature, is interwoven with Stravinsky’s “Sacre du printemps”. After an initial prolog, the music is played in its full length with a few short breaks. This gives the evening its structure and is accompanied by dance, song and clapping. More often than not, the archaic stamping appears a satire of “Dance Yourself Free”, of esoteric workshops and family therapy sessions. But the deliberate rhythms and the simple steps also lend the evening a level of abstraction that allows mothers and performers much freedom.
Eva-Maria Magel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), 28.04.2014

Reviews of the premiere in April 2014

Dance the Mother! A great show about everything but … guilt and the mistakes that parents make. … so it’s absolutely logical and conceptually stringent that the encounter between mothers and daughters is relocated to the physical realm after the enlightening “preamble”: unlike in the case of the fathers in “Lear”, the backdrop here, with the mothers, is not a play, but a ballet composition from 1913 – with a fairly crude plot from today’s point of view. In Igor Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps”, i.e. the “Rite of Spring”, a virgin is sacrificed to appeal the god of spring. The Chosen is forced to ritually dance herself to death. She She Pop have superimposed mundane issues of denial onto the religious story of sacrifice: who sacrifices what in a relationship between man and woman, between mother and child? Of course, right from the start the term “sacrifice” is the evening’s highly productive bone of contention, for as we all know taking a step back and relinquishing is not a very en vogue thing to do in today’s society of personal fulfillment. And although the number of sacrificial acts performed in the past seem obvious at first – three of the four mothers sacrificed their careers for their marriages and their children – over the course of this evening of small gestures and reading between the lines, the coordinates shift and reveal a higher degree of complexity: by giving something up, the mothers also of course developed their own projections onto and expectations of their children, which in turn have produced other, but similarly tough daughterly sacrifices. In the second part, She She Pop mainly turn all of this into dance– not of course into perfectly structured choreography and extended legs, but rather expression and communication – beyond the merely verbal. That this sometimes appears a bit awkward is in no way accidental, but rather – on the contrary – an integral part of this brilliant show’s agenda of honesty.A great show about everything but guilt and the mistakes that parents make.
Christine Wahl, Spiegel online, April 11, 2014

Look, Mother … A play with imagination and reflection, identification and rejection, subjugation, projection and alienation. … both generations are initially suspicious of speaking about sacrifice, about denial and devotion. Personal freedom and female self-empowerment was just as popular among the mothers in their own time. And yet nevertheless, one of them sacrificed her career in order to have a family, the other gave up her own future as an artist out of love for her husband. These biographical slivers, which include stories of emancipation and success, have nothing confessional about them. The performance by She She Pop and their mothers finds a good artistic form in which to embed the personal in a much wider, more extensive context and produce a narrative that many can identify with out of individual and smaller distinctly different stories.
Katrin Bettina Müller, taz Berlin, April 12, 2014

Mamma Mia Cornelia Bark, Heike Freiburg, Irene Papatheodorou and Heidi Stumpf, the mothers of performers Sebastian Bark, Johanna Freiburg, Ilia Papatheodorou and Berit Stumpf, are four very impressive ladies, who fortunately do not lean towards false harmony, in spite of whatever motherly love they may be feeling. Assemblages and recorded rehearsal conversations about setting boundaries, mutual expectations, staking claims, as well as about just how private this piece should be, can be heard from off-stage: “I really don’t want to tell just anyone everything.” The rehearsal process is deliberately used to bring life-long mother-child conflicts to a new level, but profits from the curious, as well as careful way that the three daughters and one son treat their mothers – while taking them much too seriously to conceal any differences. The form that She She Pop has found to do all this makes the piece seem neither contrived nor embarrassingly indiscrete, but rather enlightening. Unlike in the case of the fathers in “Testament”, the mothers are not live on stage. They appear on four large screens, from which they observe, comment on, wonder about their children’s performance and show their pleasure at their reactions. No more or less than what they have been doing since the birth of their offspring. That the children are now in charge is part of the game, which the mothers agreed to – at least for the length of the rehearsal period. The exploration of these mother-daughter and mother-son relationships structures the general issue of who sacrificed what for whom and thus also what the price of old gender roles is. Three of the four mothers gave up their careers for their husbands and children: “Now you have to decide, get married and have children. Of course, this baby didn’t initially fulfill me”, recalls Irene Papatheodorou. She and She She Pop are smart enough to also ask what price must be paid, when self-fulfillment is dictated by society: “I would like to know if there could be a society in which no one is willing to sacrifice anything.”
Peter Laudenbach, Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 14, 2014

Testament was chosen by the “very young” jury of the 2015 Weimar Art Fest as the most heart-rending performance.

… the mutual sharp criticisms voiced and the profound tenderness surfacing in Testament make it simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming study of family relationships. Food for thought, for the rest of your life. Kate Basset, The Times Ireland, 05.06.2014

This is a show that feels intensely honest as if it were negotiating the relationships between one generation and another live on stage. We hear the arguments that took place during rehearsal. We sense the disapproval felt about some daughters’ life and work choices. The stage is awash with unspoken resentments, unacknowledged sacrifices and misunderstandings. But it is also awash with love and regret, and, in one of the final scenes, a great litany of forgiveness. It could be sentimental; it could be tricksy. It isn’t. Instead, it searingly exposes the ties that bind, the debts we owe, and the deficits and accumulations of love. Lyn Gardner, The Guardian, 04.06.2014

Intensely uncomfortable, exposing vulnerabilities in their relationships and creatively uncovering the tension of honesty in performance art. The result is an uncompromisingly true and personal production, which punches you with emotion and teaches us what we owe our parents, and how to forgive. Spectacularly inventive and beautifully orchestrated, Testament is not to be missed. Martha Quigley, Plays to see, 04.05.2014

Mix­ing con­tem­po­rary music with pro­jec­tions, a Ger­man ver­sion of the King Lear script, and some danc­ing, She She Pop deliv­ers a ver­i­ta­ble feast for the eyes. Uti­liz­ing the whole stage in inno­v­a­tive ways, She She Pop def­i­nitely deliv­ers a full-blown per­for­mance, break­ing the fourth wall and divulging to the audi­ence their behind the scenes work and process. … the use of mul­ti­me­dia is seam­lessly inte­grated into an already mul­ti­fac­eted play.
Relat­able, charm­ing, hilar­i­ous at times, raw, and blunt, this piece is more than a trans­la­tion and adap­ta­tion of Shake­speare, but rather a work of art, a per­for­mance that incor­po­rates all you could want in a piece of the­atre. … Really, you don’t want to miss this.
SAD MAG, Vancouver, 26. Januar 2013, Emily Ross

In sum, this is a fascinating and disturbing piece — at times almost frightening in its embrace of the cruel contours of geriatrics. In a simple yet brutal scene, we see children methodically undress the fathers, pull on their clothing and then assume the thrones.
…no actor raging through the storm can match the unease this act conveys. The safety net of metaphor evaporates into an uncomfortable confrontation of the vulnerability of age.
Minneapolis Star Tribune, January 18th 2013, Graydon Royce

“Deconstruction” assumes a “reconstruction,” or perhaps even a “rediscovery.” As the text undergoes the deconstruction, it reshapes the play for performance. Think of it as a journey whereby a play is scrutinized, (re-)interpreted, and freshly revealed on stage by a company of artists.
In Germany, such undertakings have been openly embraced, albeit with mixed results. Many shows take pride in being experimental and daring theatrical explorations. An eloquent proof comes from the theatrical collective She She Pop…
Hailing from Berlin, the group has garnered many accolades, along with an inescapable cortege of controversies. Given its stated mission, She She Pop examines the way the canon of classics (Shakespeare being preeminent here) meets our present view of the world…
It is a provocative, engaging, fascinating and highly unorthodox exploration of immediate topics made apparent by their idiosyncratic “reading” (i.e., deconstructed and reconstructed) of Shakespeare’s King Lear. She She Pop’s deconstructed King Lear is, at its core, audacious and relevant…
„Reconstructing King Lear’s Tragic Condition“, commissioned for www.walkerart.org, 14. Januar 2013, Michael Lupu (Senior Dramaturg at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA)

Vor Testament hat She She Pop schon oft Themen wie Gesellschaft und Autorität behandelt, jedoch nie hatte ein Theaterstück den Ausgangspunkt gebildet. Die Gruppe lehnte dies stets ab, denn sie wolle „spontane Situationen schaffen, die die Performer und das Publikum gemeinsam meistern müssen“, erklärt das Kollektiv in einem Interview des Festival d´Automne einstimmig. Doch als eines der Mitglieder 40 wurde, fand She She Pop, dass die Zeit nun reif sei, um die Macht und Verantwortung zu hinterfragen, die Alter und Leistung verleihen. Shakespare, mit seinem König Lear, den erbenden Töchtern und dem unglücklichen Verlauf des Ganzen, hat sich da natürlich aufgedrängt. Doch She She Pop sind ihren Prinzipien treu geblieben: sie selbst zu sein, auf der Bühne, nicht sie als Schauspieler. Den Text als Informationsbasis zu nutzen, ohne ihn zu inszenieren. Einen Dialog mit den Zuschauern anzubahnen, ohne zu schummeln. Und um nicht zu schummeln konnte es im Fall von Testament nur eine Lösung geben: die Väter in das Projekt einzubinden und sie auf die Bühne zu bringen – es gilt schließlich die Frage von Nachfolge und Erbe zu klären. Schwer zu erklären, wie dem Kollektiv diese hervorragende Leistung gelungen ist. Natürlich lachen Sie, wenn Sie sehen, wie Lear in eine mathematische Gleichung verwandelt wird. Jedoch, ohne sich dessen bewusst zu sein, sind Sie hier schon am Kern der Sache: der Diskrepanz zwischen dem Leben eines Mannes, der nach einer Wahrheit sucht, die im Theater nicht zu finden ist und dem seines Kindes, das sich für die Wahrheit des Theaters entschieden hat, die im Leben unauffindbar ist. Es wäre in dieser Banalität sehr hart, um nicht zu sagen unerträglich, wenn es ihm nicht gelänge, ausgerechnet durch die Abwesenheit von Zugeständnissen Brücken zwischen den Generationen zu schlagen und die Dinge neu aufzurollen. Zärtlichkeit eingeschlossen. Um zu erfahren, wie der Umschwung vom Krieg zu einem hoffnungsvollen Frieden geschehen kann, gehen sie ins Theater des Abbesses. Sie sehen dort, am Ende von Testament, wie drei Väter und ihre Kinder ihre Stimmen zusammen erheben, zu einer Litanei des „Ich vergebe dir, …“. Sie werden verstehen, warum.

Brigitte Salino, Le Monde, 30.11.2012

Die deutsche Performance-Gruppe She She Pop präsentiert heute ihr mehrfach ausgezeichnetes Stück Testament in Sao Paolo. Dieses Stück ist paradigmatisch für das in Deutschland praktizierte zeitgenössische Theater, ein überwiegend von Prinzipien der postmodernen Ästhetik geprägtes Theater wie der kollektiven textuellen Schöpfung, einer Verweigerung der szenischen Täuschung und einer komplexen Mischung fiktionaler und realer Elemente…
Folha de Sao Paolo, 06. Oktober 2012, Marcio Aquiles

Brilliant, einfallsreich, streng, voller bemerkenswerter Momente. … Marthaler hätte es nicht besser orchestrieren können.
El Paìs, Madrid, 14.Juli, 2012, Marcos Ordónez

Wenn die erste Vorstellung des diesjährigen Grec den Maßstab für das Festival setzt, dann haben wir Glück. Das Stück Testament der deutschen Kompanie She She She Pop bietet, unter anderen Tugenden, eine schillernde Originalität. … In anderen Worten handelt sich hier um eine Originalität, die von banalen Coups und jeglichen billigen Ansätzen entfernt ist und die sich gern von der vermeintlichen Permissivität der sogenannten neuen Tendenzen schützen möchte.?…
La Vanguardia, Barcelona, 08. Juli 2012, Joan-Anton Benach

…At its tempestuous centre, Testament is about how relationships with our fathers must be renegotiated as we move towards and then beyond that pivotal point when the roles of carer and cared for are swapped – here this changeover takes place during the storm scene in Act III, when to a pumped up soundtrack we see teh daughters divest their fathers of their boots and breeches, and usurp their thrones in cardboard crowns, whooping all the while. We watch as the three men reduced to their underwear, ageing bodies exposed, rally their efforts to reclaim the text from their daughters and their dignity in the face of age; a shaking hand scrolls back through Lear to outline in red pen the pasage which must not be overlooked. It’s a strong and moving image in a production which otherwise eschews the provoking of strong emotions – much as the fair Cordelia might refuse to be manipulated into such declarations.
In bringing their real fathers on stage in Testament, She She Pop is striving to get beyond artifice and illusion to reach something true – but the ultimate gesture is made by their fathers, who are not actors after all, yet are willing to do this for their daughters…
Fíona Ní Chinnèide, www.irishtheatremagazine.ie/Reviews/Ulster-Bank-Dublin-Th., october 14th, 2011

… It’s amusing and heartfelt and honest. …
What made Testament such a joy to behold was how the company managed to be so facetious and light-hearted, entertaining and intelligent about matters of real consequence and still manage to truly affect, enlighten and disturb. They have not forgotten, that underneath theatrical ingenuity must lie a truth that needs expressing, that all the laughs and artifice must honor. It was a theatrical etiquette lesson.“
Caomhan Keane, entertainment.ie/Theatre/feature/She-She-Pop, 13 October 2011.

She She Pop & Their Fathers: Testament. Samuel Beckett Theatre
A brisk introduction, a modest fanfare and the ageing King Lear takes his throne. Eagerly anticipating his retirement plan (an unburden’d crawl towards death), Lear addresses himself to his darker purpose: dividing his kingdom among three daughters, appointing shares to whoever can shout her love the loudest. Watching three genuine fathers, in the springtime of their senescence, take to their own thrones – mismatching armchairs on a lightly suggested livingroom set – you immediately appreciate the playful depth of thought that She She Pop has put into this formally adventurous, slyly affecting piece of reality theatre.
Part text analysis, part self-ananlysis, the German company’s production explores Shakespearean archetypes as enduring models of contemporary psychology. That may sound like a needlessly dry interpretation of four female performers manning a flip chart and video projections while waering Elizabethan ruffs. But the heady pleasure of Testament is that you can have a lot of fun while being smart:if life imitates art, even a karaoke version of Something Stupid can be archly political.
Introducing King Lear as a play about „inheritance and betrayal, old age and decline“, Ilia Papatheodorou risks essentialising the drama fort he sake of a handy schematic (at the risk of sounding unnecessarily reductive, King Lear is about everything). But if that means paring the dramaturgical framework right back, you have to start from somewhere. As Lear himself memorably says, „Aus Nichts kann nichts entspringen“ – „Nothing will come of nothing.”
Indeed, one of the pleasures of the show is seeing the play’s logic expressed in a contemporary German idiom, which is to say an enjoyably deadpan reductio ad absurdum.
When Manfred Matzke, a clear-sighted rationalist who is anti-conflict, interrupts the performance with an economic analysis of Lear’s errors („The answer is given to us by this system of differential equations…“) it isn’t just funny; it recognises the fathers as contributors to the show’s dramaturgy. Even the show’s process becomes an illustration of filial conflict and threatened parental dignity, a poignant illustration of generational succession.
Nowhere is this more quietly unsettling than when the fathers question the ethics of exposing their lives to an audience, or the honesty of their daughters. In this Lear, nobody wants to play the Fool. It leads to an astonishing moment in which one father expresses „shame and embarrassment“ for his daughter’s performance art. „We are now in the storm scene,“ announces Lisa Lucassen, understandably.
Such genuine clashes make the participation of these fathers both brave and moving, a compact that ensures not even a line dance will compromise their dignity. They may not tell you anything new about Shakespeare’s play, but She She Pop’s bold and touching experiment lets the play tell us something new about our lives.
Peter Crawley, THE IRISH TIMES Weekend Review, October 8, 2011.

This piece has been celebrated and for good reasons, as can be stated after the Zurich premiere of „Testament“ by She She Pop and their fathers. It stirred the audience considerably and set a first highlight at the Theaterspektakel.
Claudio Steiger, NZZ, August, 20th, 2011

Theatertreffen 2011
“Rarely do the great questions of life present themselves on stage so spirited and full of feeling , so touching and allusive… Absolutely remarkable.”
Dirk Pilz, NZZ Online. June, 1st, 2011

Interview with She She Pop, Theatertreffen 2011

Lear goes She She Pop

The first time I saw a theatre piece by She She Pop, “Homestory” in 2002, I was plagued by lovesickness. Nothing helped counter these feelings of frustration more than seeing this piece. Seldom had I felt so well understood in all the woes of having to get through the day alone and constantly having to motivate myself to do something, just like the seven ladies in the She She Pop group and the sole male colleague incorporated into their female collective, Sebastian Bark.

I still can recall a scene, which was a wonderful exaggeration of the desire to crawl into a hole and of the search for protection against all the exertions of having to cultivate an image: As of today, announced performer Ilia Papatheodorou, “I don’t want to have anymore, I just want to be.” She decided to assume the existence of a bedspread and subsequently entered into a monologue from beneath the bedcovers about her relief of not having to come up with an identity day after day.

At this point in time She She Pop was not exactly famous for pampering their audiences with sympathetic understanding. Just the opposite. Their tendency to be on the nasty side, torturing the audience a little through intense observation, judgment, and even punishment (such as being forced to put on an ass-shaped mask) played no small role in the reputation of the group, which was formed in the 1990s in the Department of Applied Drama at the University of Geissen.

Their performances were actually a little scary. All that hardball squaring of accounts with the voyeuristic position in which viewers can make themselves comfortable was one of the outstanding qualities of their evening performances of “Live” (as of 1999) and “Bad” (as of 2002).

“The fact that we work in a very confrontational, direct, and discursive way has something to do with our history as a women’s collective,” says Ilia Papatheodorou, who has come to the interview along with Mieke Matzke. It was the experience of the comparing gaze, of being judged and categorised as a woman and female artist in the context of a student project that provided the initial spark for the founding of She She Pop.

“Who is the best dancer, who is the funniest, who is the fattest, who is the most spontaneous – on the stage women are the subject of this voyeuristic gaze to a much greater extent than men. As a way of fighting back, we turned on the lights where the audience sits and returned the gaze.” Particularly because She She Pop maintains a feminist perspective, it is all the more surprising that they have been invited to the Theatertreffen with a piece in which they appear on stage with their fathers and closely examine the contract between generations. Soon after its premiere in February 2010, “Testament – Belated Preparations for a New Generation Based on Lear” was invited for guest performances and to festivals. With increasing frequency the daughters had to call their fathers and schedule joint performances.

Does this success surprise She She Pop? Not really, says Mieke Matzke, because even when the piece was still in its conceptual phase they noticed the inherent power of the material as something many people could identify with. “People came to us from all sides with their father stories.” But “Testament” also has developed into such an impressive work, because it conveys the problems experienced during rehearsals, doubts, and lack of understanding. The discussions during rehearsals between the daughters and fathers, which threatened to end the project, where recorded and are now replayed for the actors through headphones. The way the performers quietly repeat the words, either insisting on their initial point or distancing themselves from it in their observations, constitutes some of the most brilliant scenes of the piece. Thinking becomes audible, visible, palpable.

For the performers, opening themselves to their fathers’ critique of their art was a major challenge. This was especially difficult, because these fathers were not conservative, authoritarian blockheads but rather educated middle class 68ers with high expectations regarding their children’s capacity for emancipation and self-realisation.

As a viewer, one often has the sense that the fathers and daughters are actually much closer than they themselves think. But precisely because their conflicts are not negotiated in a clichee-like but instead detailed and very concrete manner, the honesty of the individual positions is moving.

The comparison of these autobiographical experiences with Shakespeare’s “King Lear” – the story of the old king who can’t get his act together in terms of handing over his power and wealth to his daughters – provides for tension. She She Pop uses this material to address many things that anyone with aging parents must face: Who will help, when they need support? How much of one’s own life is one willing to invest in their care? How do siblings view the division of parental love and their parents’ inheritance?

The calculations (what is an hour of parental love worth in euros?) and sample cases that She She Pop uses to explore these questions are amusing, on the one hand, especially because they are often presented in very dry style. On the other, they reveal the lack of existing language for addressing these questions without one party being hurt.

She She Pop’s longstanding experience in creating simple but complex narrative images comes to their advantage in “Testament“. In the beginning small video cameras are pointed at the fathers’ faces, which are projected within three large picture frames – already establishing a style characteristic of regal representation. It is precisely here, later, where the children don cardboard crowns and put on the shirts of their fathers, who experienced taking them off as an act of humiliation.

At the end, the three picture frames present an almost baroque vanitas motif with tulips and apples, beneath which daughters, fathers, and one son lie on top of each other in layers – a confirmation of their connection above and beyond all discursive issues. It is also an anticipation of the mortality that unites them. This is She She Pop, and this is Shakespeare at its best.

Today, most members of the collective are close to 40 in age. Ilia Papatheodouro brought her baby son to the interview. Rehearsals now need to be coordinated with the care of seven young children. The perplexity and despair of this dual role as mothers and artists fuelled much of the comedy in their “Seven Sisters” performance, which preceded “Testament” and raised feminist issues more explicitly than earlier pieces. “Now that we have our own families and have brought the conflicts with our own partners on board, the experience of fighting over who does what and when with the kids, plays a major role,” says Ilia. And Mieke adds: “While we were rehearsing ‘Seven Sisters’, the discussion came up again: Where do we really stand? Can we really talk about having accomplished something, or achieved our goals? Or why do we get bogged down on so many levels, why are so many concealed?”

She She Pop never wanted to start their own theatre. They felt they were in good hands with their co-production partners, Kampnagel in Hamburg, the Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, and the FFT Düsseldorf. Important to them in their process was being able to maintain autonomy over their collective and their projects. “Because we held on to our feminist standpoint and the collective, we were often accused of being stuck in the 1970s,” says Mieke Matzke, “but today there is a renewed focus on and political interest in these concepts, also in terms of their utopian potential. Working in a collective also means creating a different kind of obligation to one another, which goes beyond networking.”

Apropos utopia, in “Seven Sisters” three of the small, preschool children appear in a projection as if they had been playing in a back room of the theatre the whole time. At the end they are given the task of developing a utopia. “If someone asks you where you are going, say ‘to Moscow, to Moscow,’ instructs Sebastian Bark, packing them into anoraks and sending them out onto the street in the dark of night.

On the one hand, this is a quote from Chekhov’s “Three Sisters”, to which the production continuously refers in exploring the question of the right way to live. On the other hand, the image of little children on the street at night pointedly conveys the contemporary fear of having no more utopias, of being utterly unable to paint a positive picture of the future. And also the fear of exposing one’s children to terrible uncertainty.

Actually, major drama – but packed into such a small picture, as if this pounding concern needs to be forcibly kept down to size, if we are to keep functioning. And ultimately the art of She She Pop lies in this ability to specifically nail down vague thinking.
Katrin Bettina Müller, Tageszeitung, 29.04.2011

Laudatio zum Friedrich-Luft-Preis
“Besonders bemerkenswert an Testament ist der Mut sich den universellen Themen zu stellen, wie eben Tod, Krankheit, Einsamkeit, Vergänglichkeit und immer wieder steht auch die große alte Dame Zeit auf der Bühne. Mal mehr mal weniger im Vordergrund und doch schon dadurch immer präsent, daß die Akteure so deutlich sichtbar immer Kinder ihrer Zeit sind und bleiben werden”.
Laudatio von Claudia Wiedemer, 05.04.2011

“I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU
For twelve years now, the performance collective SHE SHE POP has transformed issues of (also) personal meaning to them into theater. Their most recent production “Testament” is a particularly well-made and successful example of this.”
Eva Behrendt, Theater heute, 06/ 2010

“Once the first “Lear” scene is read, the beautiful delirium, which She She Pop so expertly know how to work with, sneaks its way onto the stage… The She She Pop fraud is less about lying than about dithering. Dithering between process and product, discussion and text, intimacy and distance… In the personal conversations, the piece surprisingly returns over and over again to precisely those leitmotifs, which propel the old drama forward. “Testament” offers hundreds of such possible misunderstandings.”
Tobi Müller, Frankfurter Rundschau, February 27th, 2010

“courageous, honest and intelligent… a big hit.”
Klaus Witzeling, Hamburger Abendblatt, March 9th, 2010

“Charming and crafty”
nachtkritik.de Berlin, 22.06.2007, Petra Kohse

“We laughed along incessantly with this intelligent rubbish which contains so many truths”
Die WELT 30.03.2007, Monika Nellissen

“She She Pop lay themselves bare at the risk of failure every evening with charm and courage”
Ballett Tanz Juni 2007, Klaus Witzeling

She She Pop hat sich in ein Footballteam verwandelt. Die Girl Gang spielt mit den Versatzstücken des Machosports, ein Fall angewandter gender theory.
Peter Laudenbach im Tagesspiegel, 14. Mai 2001

“….while RULES is a very funny crossover of sports, work psychology and gender trouble, it also shows the tragic elements which makes a theatre performance an experience, even a piece of art.”
Tom Mustroph in Theater der Zeit, June 2001

“…funny and eloquent, sporting and esthetic, profound and theatrical.”
Hildesheimer Allgemeine Zeitung, June 17th, 2003

“It is thanks to the intellectual self-cleansing power of irony and an infectious madness that this revue of shame is never anything but an example of professional trash-humour…”
Till Briegleb, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 24. April 2003

“E for encore!”
Denis Krah, Hamburger Morgenpost, 22. April 2003

A holiday from the oppression of the self
I am Mieke. You are Mieke. We are all Mieke. In Berlin’s HAU 3 theatre, during a feature film length performance, we learn about the inner life and workings of the Art figure Mieke Matzke as presented to us by four fellow performers and Mieke Matzke herself.
As with other shows by the Giessen Applied Theatre Studies graduates, who now perform together as the collective She She Pop, the audience members become participants and players.
(…) What or rather who have we taken in during our time with She She Pop? The Mieke of this evening is neurotic, lonely and fragmented. She is a loose bunch of characteristics, a collection of dreamy, daily tasks, lovely quirks and sad rituals.
(…) The final song takes Mieke’s (and our) plight to a new level. “We know our stories, but we don’t know how they relate” Identity requires a central theme. Mieke, however, has entangled herself in her stories: Are the pictures in our heads only holiday snaps or imagined wishes?
(…) ‘Mieke’ becomes for us an imaginary friend like the ones that you have when you are a young child, a friend with which you can test out the relationships between yourself and the outside world.
Nachtkritik / Elena Philipp

She She Pop belong to the group of innovative Theatre Collectives working in Berlin at the moment.
The standard Theatrical separation between the performers and the Public has been cast aside like never before. There is no safety in the darkened rows of seats, only the play space between lit tents and cardboard stools.
In this environment She She Pop and Israeli guest Performer Nir de Volff invite you to a masked ball of sorts. The slipping on of another identity with all of it’s performed frictions and emotionlessness
(…) Occasionally there are flashes of self irritation or a peculiar empathy with what we can see of the strange inner life of Mieke.
Ute Büsing – Info Radio/Culture Show – March, 24th, 2009

Whether the experiment works or not depends, in the end, on the audience
The friendly and determined invitation to put on a new face left me with no choice. Obediently I squatted on a stool and, along with my neighbours left and right, drew my new identity onto a cut out paper mask following the stencil. (…) The stranger’s eyes belong to Mieke Matzke, one of the members of Performance group She She Pop. The theatre becomes a roll play area. In small groups e are divide up and embark upon a journey into the inner world of Mieke.(…) The work of She She Pop consists of participatory organized chaos in which the way out is always clearly signposted. Whether the experiment works or not depends, in the end, on the audience.
Gerd Brendel, DeutschlandRadio Kultur, March, 23rd, 2009

She She Pop’s ironic and entertaining performance style tolerates no escape into illusion. The witty performers, more or less always themselves, instead collide the clichés of happiness and desire with the difficulties of the real world in a blaze of poignant improvisations.
Klaus Witzeling, Hamburger Abendblatt, April, 15th, 2006

„Dry unpretentiousness (not to be mixed up with irony) and charming anarchic nostalgia. She She Pop interpret performance casually as absurd discourse workshop. … The surprised audience shined with partially serious interaction in the vision.“
Hermann Götz, Theater der Zeit, December 2005

Funny, embarrassing, rich in emotion and a great success with the audience.
Hamburger Morgenpost, January16th, 2004

(…) a wonderful work, balancing delicately between performance and social event. She She Pop conceives a charming, highly entertaining and intelligent arrangement (…)
Daniel Schreiber, Theater der Zeit, March, 2004

…From the beginning they reverse roles and pleasurably irritate audience expectations and theatre customs …The ones who are naked are not necessarily the exposed.
Karin Liebe, taz Hamburg, February 2nd, 2002

The bad girls from She She Pop know where the fun ends and the art of irritation begins.
Jutta Baier, Frankfurter Rundschau, February 16th, 2002

… riskily and courageously the performers of She She Pop take liberties and by doing that they undermine (beauty-) clichés and sexual mechanisms of power with humour and self-irony and achieve a kind of liberation – not only for themselves…
Klaus Witzeling, Hamburger Abendblatt, February 2nd, 2002