Martin Luther Propagandastück

Boris Nikitin

It’s about making decisions. Actually it’s always about making decisions. It’s not as if the matter didn’t lie in our own hands. Regardless of whether it’s believing, loving, making a table, killing someone – or dying.
In his latest theater fragment, director Boris Nikitin works together with performer Malte Scholz again, as they did previously in ‘F wie Fälschung’ (‘F is for Fake’) and ‘Woyzeck’, which were invited to Impulse in 2009. ‘Martin Luther Propagandastück’ is, in a blend of freely-revolving theological discourse and an atheist motivational sermon, an attempt to endorse a leap in the dark, the moment in which we can feel something like freedom.
While a choir accompanies the sermon forcefully with familiar gospel songs, reminders of Heiner Müller’s ‘Mission’ can be heard indirectly: an uprising of black slaves in Jamaica planned by Europeans which never happens because at home in Europe the French revolution and its reputation for freedom are long corrupted and no longer fashionable. So what freedom do we have? How freely can we act, how can we influence reality independently? And when does individual radicalism turn into ideology, fundamentalism or terror?
Boris Nikitin’s pieces are frequently staged ready-mades simply within a gently skewed framework. ‘Martin Luther Propagandastück’, too, is just what its name promises and yet also a very delicate balancing act. A religious service which is theatre – and which in this way makes what we call reality recognizable as a composition: a composition which can actually be changed.

The show on 25 June is followed by an Artist Talk

ON

Duration 70’

Tickets can be purchased here

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