“It’s about everything,” trumpets this evening full-bodiedly in the Volksbühnenhimmel, “about war and peace, love and death, about everything that connects us.” That’s true on the one hand. And at the same time not. Because above all it’s – sorry – about shit. No matter where you look.
A gigantic heap of shit curls up floating above a multi-storey, metal play structure, actor Daniel Zillmann appears with a crown made of excrement and a costume draped with sausages, a colleague lets down his pants to fart heartily. Again and again, toilets are driven onto the stage, from which it sometimes emits devilish steam. Lilith Stangenberg sits on one of them and yells: “What is that actually, death?” Well, something’s going on here!
The program features “SMAK!”, an acronym for “SuperMacho AntiKristo”, the first Berlin theater production by the Philippine guerrilla artist Khavn de la Cruz. The man is said to have already shot at least two hundred short and feature films (quantity is its own currency in the trash cosmos), he is considered a pioneer of digital cinema and no longer an insider tip in this country at the latest since Alexander Kluge made the film “Happy Lamento” with him in 2018. realized. Khavn is also a musician, writer and punk poet – someone who cheerfully navigates between underground and serious art and likes to cast his performers off the streets in the Philippines.
Now he has arrived in the German subsidized theater. The circus is in town! Khavn’s anarcho crew meets Volksbühne employees and the musician Brezel Göring from Stereo Total, a hundred acts of an exuberant Dada opera are performed and 25 songs are sung. They deal, for example, with the fact that the world is either a place for maggots, a pigsty or, of course, a toilet. Now, of course, the whole thing has a serious background. Two events from 1896 are linked: the premiere of Alfred Jarry’s scandalous play “King Ubu” in Paris. And the execution of the Filipino writer and reformer José Rizal by the Spanish colonial government in the context of revolutionary upheavals.
Thrown Jonathan Meese’s library into the blender
Scandal, revolution, colonialism – these are all suitable anchors of relevance. You can hold on to them while for three hours (without a break) short actors fight fencing fights, “snake dildos” are swung or a character named Pope Mustard performs baptisms with urine. Speaking of characters, or: story of the evening. A separate leaflet explains the “SMAK!” cosmos. It reads as if Jonathan Meese had thrown his library in a blender.
There’s Ubulbulul, the mob king, who has “covered more planets and universes than you can count, making him churn out the stinkiest, wettest farts.” Or Faustrollol, who “uses his arcane knowledge and brilliant analytical mind for pataphysical divination”. Or Caesar Hazard, who “requires regular electroshocks and lobotomies to keep his penis hyperactive.”
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Lilith Stangenberg, who played the title role in Khavn and Kluge’s feature film “Orphea” two years ago and on whose initiative the obsessive elimination spectacle is supposed to recede, portrays Sisa Jarry, “a grieving madwoman” whose children Alf and Frida Jarry were eaten.
(The next performances are on April 15, 16, 19, 20, 27 and 28. On April 18, Khavn presents the 13-hour film concert “Simulacrum Tremendum” with numerous guests. Start: 12 p.m.)
For your peace of mind: most of it doesn’t take place on stage, the action flickers past the stage primarily in titles. Alternatively, you can read song lyrics, haiku-like word puzzles (“the spider in the marble web doesn’t tell the whole truth”) or simply terms like scrotum, sweet potatoes and foot pain. The program also reveals the silent film Nitroglycerine in The Pomegranate, apparently made in the 1920s by Narding Salome Exelsio based on José Rizal’s unfinished novel Makamisa. Other literary inspirations: Speeches by Hitler and Putin, lyrics by Jarry, Marquis de Sade, Guy Debord, Philippine revolutionaries and last but not least – mother goose nursery rhymes.
The evening is fattened with references. No matter what subversive power Khavn’s works unfold in their much more exciting Filipino contexts, there is no sign of it on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. The evening implodes with the first “lick my ass” song. And then circles powerless and aimless around itself – and pee-poo. Completely value-free it remains to be said: There hasn’t been such shit for a long time.
