After the performance Possessed – a collective monologue by She She Pop, there will be a meeting between the company and Gianni Manzella.
Gianni Manzella is a writer, essayist, undisciplined scholar of contemporary theater and more. He has written and curated books focused on the contemporary theater scene, including Hölderlin Rifrazioni (1992); La bellezza amara. Arte e vita di Leo de Berardinis (2nd ed. 2010); La possibilità della gioia. Pippo Delbono (2017). His theater chronicles have been published for many years in the pages of the newspaper “Il manifesto.” He started the magazine of performing arts culture and politics “art’o”.
She She Pop is a Berlin-based feminist performance collective that emerged in the 1990s from the Giessen Institute for Applied Theater Studies.
The members see themselves as authors, dramaturges and performers of their stage action. The inclusion of their own autobiography is above all a method, not a purpose of the work. She She Pop practices a form of theater that is committed to experimentation. They use the stage as a place of acute public: here decisions are made, ways of talking and social systems are tried out, speech gestures and social rituals are rehearsed or discarded. She She Pop sees its task as a search to find the social limits of communication – and to go beyond the protective space of the theatre, in both specific and artistic terms. The theatre is turned into a space for utopian communication. The audience, too, is often given a special function: all of She She Pop’s works are experiments or demonstrations of evidence that would be invalid without spectators.
She She Pop celebrated their 25th anniversary in 2018. Members are Sebastian Bark, Johanna Freiburg, Lisa Lucassen, Mieke Matzke, Ilia Papatheodorou, Berit Stumpf, and Elke Weber. Former group members are Fanni Halmburger, Claude Jansen, Katharina Oberlik and Anja von Steht.
The international production house HAU Hebbel am Ufer has been their continuous coproducer and cooperation partner in Berlin since 2003. In addition, there is a wide network of cooperating houses in Germany and abroad: Munich Kammerspiele, Schauspiel Stuttgart, Schauspiel Leipzig, Kampnagel Hamburg, Forum Freies Theater in Dusseldorf, Mousonturm Frankfurt / Main and Kaserne Basel, brut Wien, Theatre de la Ville / Festival d’Automne de Paris, Festival Kyoto Experiment Archa Theatre Prague, Prague German language Festival and the Konfrontationen Festival Lublin and Festival delle Colline Torinesi Turin / TPE – Teatro Piemonte Europa.