Compartments

In COMPARTMENTS, She She Pop (all of whom were raised in West Germany) meet several adversaries raised in the East onstage in order to open up each other’s drawers. A collective biography of the last 40 years should emerge from the personal materials of the performers.

Letters, excerpts from journals, and other personal text documents will be roughly chronologically sorted as well as literature, political texts, each performer’s internal image repertoire, and music. Night after night, the material from the lives of the 3 East-born and 3 West-born performers will be recombined, read aloud, and published. Questions about the other side must be answered as best they can. A history of the East-West German division will be told live, backed up by private and/or publically available text sources, and refereed by memories either in harmony with or contrary to the two great mid-twentieth century worldviews.

She She Pop and their Eastern colleagues search for the objective in the private. They avow polyphony, collective narration. Gaps, incommensurabilities, imprecisions, and missing links are a part of their system. Who were we? Who are we? Why have we become who we are?