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About Die Kränkungen der Menschheit

How often do we think about the mechanisms of our perception, about what the way that we look at and interpret things may say about our own viewing habits and imprints? In this almost contemplative production, Anta Helena Recke creates three staged experimental set-ups that are open to interpretation and where images, sounds and movements play the starring role. Among other issues, the show deals with a reflection on our own gaze and the notions that constitute humanity. And, not least, with rethinking the theatre as the art of looking.

The production “Die Kränkungen derMenschheit” creates a cycle of images. Pictures overlap one another in succession, creating a hybrid space among museum, zoo, and laboratory: a horde of monkeys populates the stage, ultimately gathering together around a strange man in a white lab coat to be fed as they do every day; a small museum group takes a wander through the museum of a fictitious European capital; a large group of people draws patterns in the room.The evening takes us to those fragile moments when one idea of the world is replaced by another. Inspired by Sigmund Freud’s notion of die “Kränkungen der Menschheit” or “humiliations to humankind” which deals with loss of humankind’s supremacy, the production devotes itself to the even more fundamental question, who is, in fact, humanity? “Humiliations to Humankind” is about the desire for showing, organizing, and understanding. It’s a piece about a society overtaken by its own past.

About Anta Helena Recke
Anta Helena Recke studied Scenic Arts at the University of Hildesheim. During her studies, she developed several transdisciplinary performances as well as projects in the field of music-curating. Her works are concept art in the form of performances and explore the marking and non-repetition of normativity with the aim of creating spaces of experience for the audience that they would not normally enter. In various constellations, she works as a director, dramaturg and other functions. Recke’s production of “Mittelreich”, which premiered at Münchner Kammerspiele in 2017, was presented at the 2018 radikal jung festival and invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen in the same year.  With “Die Kränkungen der Menschheit” she has once more been invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen. The critics’ survey of Theater heute named her Emerging Artist of the Year 2018. Furthermore, she is the 2019 award winner of the International Theatre Institute (ITI).

Credits

Cast:

Concept & Director: Anta Helena Recke

Concept & Artistic Collaborators: Anna Froelicher, Maxi Menja Lehmann

Stage Design: Carlo Siegfried

Costume Design: Pola Kardum

Music: Luca Mortellaro

Lighting Design: Joscha Eckert

Dramaturgy: Valerie Göhring

Research: Marja Christians, Chiara Galesi

Production: Olaf Nachtwey, Johanna J. Thomas

Choreography, Text, Performance:

Ariane Andereggen, Jean Chaize, Noah Donker, Sir Henry, Kinan Hmeidan, Mario Lopes, Lara-Sophie Milagro, Benjamin Radjaipour, Vincent Redetzki, Joana Tischkau, Else Tunemyr, Samuel Iatã Vieira da Silva Hölzl, Hayato Yamaguchi etc.

About Berliner Theatertreffen
All year round, Berliner Festspiele host a multitude of festivals, exhibitions and individual events in two houses – the Haus der Berliner Festspiele at Schaperstraße and the Gropius Bau near Potsdamer Platz – and other venues in the city. The combination and network of a festival house and an exhibition hall bears special potential for interdisciplinary project formats and the interaction of different forms of art. An annual programme includes the exhibitions and events at Gropius Bau, the festivals MaerzMusik – Festival for Time Issues, Theatertreffen, Musikfest Berlin and Jazzfest Berlin, the programme series Immersion as well as four National Contests for young people in the fields of theatre, dance, music and creative writing. In addition, there are education programmes, international guest performances, special events, venue rentals and conferences. Since Thomas Oberender was appointed director in 2012, Berliner Festspiele have been focusing on topics like performativity, alternative ways of artistic production and cross-genre approaches. Their formats provide both an overview and orientation, creating new connections between contemporary art, technological innovation and heterogeneous forms of work, discourse and experience.

Statement of the Jury
Anta Helena Recke adds another “Humiliation of Mankind” to the three previously noted by Sigmund Freud (1. Mankind descends from the apes; 2. The sun is the centre of the universe; 3. People are at the mercy of their unconscious mind): White European men are not the paragons of mankind after all. With her criticism of White Supremacy, the director prompts her audience to reflect on their own views and associated patterns of decoding. In the setting of an art museum, a painting is re-enacted and a different picture is discussed among a group of visitors. This largely meditative performance presents a sublime scrutiny of viewing norms and thereby patterns of reception and representation. Recke touches on several post-colonial discourses–from restitution to white normative thinking, applying unusual energetic devices of presence and absence.

Reviews

“Die Kränkungen der Menschheit stages in its three parts a history of the colonial past, the coloniality of the current and a decolonial vision. It finds a theatrical language that somehow leaves the “Master’s tool” as Audre Lorde has suggested it, behind.”

- Azadeh Sharifi, theatre scholar, researcher, and lecturer, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich

“The young German-Senegalese director’s chamber production is a meditative and mysterious treatise on the subjective power of the gaze. The points of contact range from Freud to German Romantic painting to postcolonial theory over a sparse, hourlong production that asks questions about observing and being observed.”

- A.J. Goldmann, The New York Times

About Münchner Kammerspiele
The Münchner Kammerspiele are among the most important stages in the German-speaking context. Since its beginnings in the 1920ies, the theatre has been shaped by a strong ensemble, which particularly seeks the dialogue and confrontation with the present. Having presented numerous world premieres, including works by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Frank Wedekind and Bertolt Brecht, the theatre conceives itself as an aesthetically innovative, contemporary, and cosmopolitan municipal theatre with a socio-political focus. They have been invited to numerous festivals both in Germany as well as abroad.

Directed by Anta Helena Recke
Münchner Kammerspiele in co-production with HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Kampnagel (Hamburg) and Künstlerhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt)
World premiere 26 September 2019
WHERE: Münchner Kammerspiele