CREDITS

DIRECTION AND TEXT Lola Arias
WITH Bishop Black, River Roux, Dieter Rita Scholl
LIVE-MUSIC Katharina Ernst
CONCEPT Lola Arias, River Roux
DRAMATURGY Bibiana Mendes
RESEARCH River Roux, Bibiana Mendes
SET Irene Ip
COSTUMES Tutia Schaad
MUSIC COMPOSITION Katharina Ernst, Damián Noguera
CHOREOGRAPHY Colette Sadler
VIDEO Stefan Korsinsky | Expander Films
LIGHT Irene Ip, Catalina Fernández, Arndt Sellentin
PRODUCTION, DISTRIBUTION AND COMPANY MANAGEMENT Laura Cecilia Nicolas
PRODUCTION ASSISTANT Belén Marinato
OUTSIDE EYE Johannes Kirsten
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR Jan Termin, Belén Marinato
SET ASSISTANT Anne-Kathrin Müller
COSTUMES ASSISTANT Julia Radewald, Isabel Faulkner
CHOREOGRAPHY ASSISTANT Roseann Dendy
VIDEO ASSISTANT Zuzanna Marczak
PRODUCED BY Maxim-Gorki Theater and Lola Arias Company

TOUR

PRESS

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DIRECTOR'S NOTE

Sometimes, it’s hard to know exactly when an idea is born. In the case of Androgynous, the piece was born from another work. In 2023, while I was searching for the protagonists of Happy Nights I met River Roux, who brought together the worlds of sex work and dance, and therefore became a central figure in that production. After the show premiered, I saw enormous potential in River, and I wanted to keep working with her. During rehearsals, she had talked about her fascination with Anita Berber. I didn’t know much about Anita at that time, but I thought it was a good idea to create a piece about someone obsessed with the life of a person who lived a hundred years ago, in a distant historical moment that feels increasingly familiar to us. That’s how we began this research process, together with the dramaturg Bibiana Mendes.

While I was still working on another piece, Los días afuera, in Argentina, River went to the Anita Berber archives in Cologne and Berlin, and we began gathering material about her life, her dances, her films and the context of the Weimar Republic. Little by little, we began to shape the project and realized that the interesting part was how a contemporary dancer in nightclubs reconstructs the life of another dancer who turned her nudity into a spectacle of seduction, yet also self-determination. Just as River moved from pole dancing in the strip club to performing at the state theatre, Anita made the opposite journey – from ballet school to nightclubs, becoming part of the Naked Ballets and eventually a radical figure in dance and performance.

When we started rehearsing the show, I wasn’t sure if it should be a solo performance. But then I realized that River needed to be accompanied by other artists to reflect on the importance of community in nightlife as well. After auditioning several performers, we fell in love with Bishop Black and Dita Rita Scholl. They had a very unique way of working with their bodies and identities: Dita carried with him the heritage of gay movements and queer cabaret from the 1980s and ’90s Germany, while Bishop brought a rich background that blends performance art, drag, and burlesque.

What little we know about Anita’s dances comes from police reports, some reviews, photos and the few films which were not destroyed by the Nazis. No one knows exactly what those performances were like. River, Bishop and Dita therefore bring to life a lost, fragmented archive. And it is in that space between reconstruction and imagination that the work takes place. 

Androgynous connects two historical moments —Berlin in the 1920s and Berlin in the 2020s, and the fascist threat of then and now— through a work where the body becomes a tool for resistance. Just as Anita Berber used her body to reconstruct her own experience, pushing the boundaries of what art can be, today’s performers confront us with the histories of their own bodies, shaped by desire, the social gaze and the self-exploitation options that capitalism imposes on us.

Lola Arias