“’Bullshit’ doesn’t need any explicit political references; the background murmurings of an age in which facts and reliable knowledge are no longer hard currency is audible enough throughout the evening, especially just before the US elections. As the saying goes: We all look through our own window at a tiny slice of the world and believe it to be reality. True enough. The performance is one of She She Pop’s stronger pieces because there is something truly at stake here: the possibility of a common understanding.”
Tagesspiegel, Patrick Wildermann, 30 October 2024

“Wonderful references to theatre and life are in the commercial break, e.g. when Bark wants to sell the pillar of the stage portal that separates everything into above and below, reality and fiction – and without which the theatre would collapse (as it will soon anyway, see Berlin’s current cultural politics). (…) After 90 short minutes, the old world has been sold and a new one only just been sketched out, the old community has been privatised and a new one just emerging. Much here remains unclear. But this is also an opportunity, because this evening leaves one thinking even longer about whether we have really exhausted all possibilities of staying in dialogue with each other.”
Berliner Morgenpost, Georg Kasch, 30 October 2024

“For now the evening can enter into its true state of transformation, even attempt an existential leap. A new theatre – that is also a new form of perceiving, speaking and being. Above all, a different type of hearing, perhaps with echolocation like bats? (…) We have taken the first step into a new world of perception. Everything is still very dark here, but you can hear the scratching and flapping of wings, and perhaps we will soon learn the alphabet of sound waves.”
Berliner Zeitung, Doris Meierhenrich, 30 October 2024

“It’s no longer clear whether they are people or animals. You only see very blurred images on black and white televisions, much is in the dark. We are left very much guessing what kind of metamorphosis will take place after this cleansing, after this sell-out. We have never seen this illusionistic method from this group before. They have really broken new ground.”
Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Fazit, Tobi Müller, 29 October 2024

“Yet She She Pop explore the immaterial further: Wouldn’t it be nice to encounter the world in completely new ways, the group muses – and presents a miniature dialogue-based encounter with animals on stage. (…) “What do you actually have against herds?”, Smarty Sheep philosophises or rather ultimately bleats to the performer – thus questioning the principle of selfish individualism. That there is just as much to criticise about human herd behaviour will then be explored in the next performance, which is sure to be just as great.”
taz, Jenni Zylka, 31 October 2024

“They (…) were treated to a performance in which no one is too embarrassed to put the literally naked facts, even those of a no longer young female body, at the service of doubt, of questioning what one knows or thinks one knows and what is now crumbling and crumbling. (…) It’s been a long time since we’ve seen anything as intense as “Bullshit” from the icons of the German-language performance scene.”
FAZ, Eva-Maria Magel, 24 November 2024

“Like fresh teenagers on a self-awareness course, four members of the She She Pop team (Johanna Freiburg, Berit Stumpf, Mieke Matzke, Sebastian Bark at the premiere) sit half-naked on stage, looking at their genitals with mirrors. The time is ripe for them to take a good look at their bodies again, which they do right from the start with a touch of delightful intimacy lacking any embarrassment. (…) (…) All is revealed. The show examines issues of getting thinner or fatter, age spots and wrinkles, spare tyres and period blood. The performers do a self-deprecating survey which, by the end, has become a fantastic She She Pop spectacle (…)
(…) In one of the best scenes, separate body parts are assembled on the video screen. For example, a head becomes a belly or Sebastian Bark crawls out from a women’s pubis like during birth. It’s a show wonderfully self-mocking images about gender, in a cinematic transformation that lands punches and teases every which way. (…)”
Simone Kaempf, nachtkritik, 19.09.2020

“Not only wrinkles and belly fat are shown, but close-ups of a woman’s pubis are projected onto the set and quickly distorted in fast succession. Body parts and faces connect while the history of witch-hunts is discussed or the performers discuss menstruation, the female body in capitalism and bodily self-image. “Is it the spotlights or am I just having a hot flash?” asks Berit Stumpf at one point. The evening, which lasts just seventy minutes, is a post-dramatic tour de force, joyous, funny and feisty. (..)(…) They question and film each other, set challenges, concoct artificial menstrual blood for the man in their team and keep raising the stakes until, in a rapturous finale, the old tropes are abolished. Loyalty to the male gaze, which reduces women who can no longer have children to witches, is renounced. (…) The effect is electrifying, and the audience ends up bewitched, bothered and bewildered.”
André Mumot, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, 19.09.2020

“The fact that this neither seems pornographic or provocative, but just a natural part of intimate research, is down to the group’s tongue-in-cheek performance. Nothing about this show is uptight or exhibitionistic. (…) (…) it is a highly self-deprecating mixture of horror film and witches’ kitchen. (…) It is (…)[the] intimacy, the light-heartedness and the humour that touch you.” Barbara Behrendt, Inforadio RBB Kultur, 19.09.2020 “A body is never just a body, least of all when it is female. And this is why Hexploitation primarily consists of the performers beating their way through the tangle of male-dominated tropes of the Other, as well as myths and manipulations that classify the female body and render it available. Persistent diagnoses of irritability during the menopause, for example, which Mieke Matzke presents in a lecturer’s tone, are countered by the performers’ radically unemotional, cold view of their genital anatomy. (…) Hexploitation (…) takes you by surprise with its completely unashamed radicalism.”
Doris Meierhenrich, Berliner Zeitung, 21.09.2020

“(…) Most of the scenes are performed throughout in an open bathrobe or completely naked. This does not break any aesthetic conventions, but points to the fact that spaces and roles for women over 50 are dwindling, not least in the cultural sector. The menopause is a metaphor for invalidation. And it’s about women’s bare existence. She She Pop celebrate the attempt to break away from this age-old trope of withering femininity in a cool film-studio setting. Here, video artist Benjamin Krieg creates a striking visual layer with his own narrative: he shows close-ups of vulvas, which sometimes take up the entire theatre in a carousel of images, and morphs the faces of the performers into each other, as well as other clever cross-fades (…).”
Patrick Wildermann, Tagesspiegel, 21.09.20

“(…) The show is a potent mixture of witches’ sabbath and a discourse on exploitation, which, as is customary in She She Pop, finds its roots in the group’s radical exhibitionism, but almost immediately spills over into a comprehensive structural analysis that spans decades. In the witches’ cauldron, we find the pathologised woman of around fifty; medical research, which orients its drugs on men’s organisms; an armada of misogynistic poets and thinkers (such as Rainer Maria Rilke and “The Faded One”) alongside many other wicked things, combined with unsparing close-ups of fleshy folds, drooping breasts and the members’ thinning hair. Those who scream “authenticity” here must also scream “ironic twist”, because the much-maligned concept of authenticity is, as always in She She Pop’s work, skilfully undermined in this lecture-performance that combines text, music (Santiago Blaum), video (Benjamin Krieg) and outlandish costumes (Lea Søvsø).”
Dorte Lena Eilers, Theater der Zeit, 1/2021

“(…) She She Pop declares war on the patriarchs of this world and then belt out Lana Del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful”, in which being “young” and “beautiful” happen not to be requirements for a worthwhile life. Now, if not sooner, it is clear that the group understands female issues without falling into heavy-handed activism. Because this is not a moralising show. It considers its subject realistically in the context of culture and pop-culture, initiating a self-healing process with its open display of bodies and self-doubt, of which many fashionably feminist theatre professionals can only dream.”
Anna Fastabend, Theater heute, Oktober 2020