50 Grades of Shame

She She Pop

A picture album inspired by Wedekind’s spring awakening

Shame is not really very fashionable. Perhaps a little bit, maybe. A shy kind of shame occasionally. Like when you’re caught reading ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ for example. Otherwise divulging one’s sexual preferences in public, boasting of mistakes and flirtatious regrets are all part of making a good impression. At least for those who can afford to do so.
Sexual enlightenment – as in Frank Wedekind’s ‘Spring Awakening’, where it is a problem which causes parents to fail and children to fall apart – no longer seems to be a scandal in the West. On the contrary: where people have unlimited access to explicit images individual sexual fulfilment has become the norm.
But is that truly the case? She She Pop examines the sliding scale between innocence and knowledge and reveals that all enlightening talk about gender and sexuality is also talking about power. Strategic images are constructed which at the same time exclude a great deal.
Desire, reproduction and gender are also ideologies and fictions.
Inspired by Wedekind’s utopian concept of education, She She Pop set up an educational institution of their own, forming a hybrid college whose syllabus goes no further than its collective faculty and their accumulated shame.
As always with She She Pop, there is a concern with the theater itself: in this production with the Münchner Kammerspiele, the collective is joined by actresses and actors from the Kammerspiele’s ensemble – their different ways of talking about shame and their own bodies are also different forms of acting, of understanding a role and of representation.
Alongside scenes from ‘Spring Awakening’ and the bestseller ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’, an ars
erotica develops through full-on teaching, supported with virtuoso video clips where all images of the body are permanently mixed up, exchanged and over-written.

The show on 19 June will be followed by an Artist Talk

Talk Ausreden – Kunst zwischen Performance und Verstellung (in German) with members of the production at 15 h on 19 June

ON

Duration 105’

Tickets can be purchased here

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