Since 2005, director Monika Gintersdorfer and visual artist Knut Klaßen have been creating cross-genre productions on cultural differences in collaboration with a German-Ivorian team of performers. In “Kabuki Noir”, the traditional dramatic codes of the Japanese dance-drama kabuki are set against the codes of the Ivorian Coupé Décalé and post-modern dance and transformed into a new hybrid stage ritual. As opposed to Western performance practice, kabuki productions have remained the same for centuries. As a result, the situations presented have a ritual character and leave a strong aesthetic impression. Glamorous costumes, narrative choreographies and stage elements form a vocabulary which is hardly decipherable for those not familiar with the art form. Gintersdorfer/Klaßen take up this homogenous repertoire and re-cast it with their team of performers – with the aim to create a theater based on flat hierarchies. In a cultural appropriation, political, spiritual and comic scenes from traditional kabuki become the starting point for a narrative about the visible and invisible demarcations of our time.

With: Jean-Claude Dagbo alias DJ Meko, Gotta Depri, Jule Flierl, Montserrat Gardó Castillo, Hallo Werner Clan, Hauke Heumann, Franck Edmond Yao alias Gadoukou la Star
Assistence stage: Marc Aschenbrenner
Assistence costume: Eva Carbo
Assistence: Lisa Magierski, Royce, Aleks Cigale
Dramaturgical advice: Eric Parfait Francis Taregue, Konstanze Hanitzsch
Logistic: Axel Gerber

Production: Gintersdorfer/Klaßen
Coproduction: HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin
Support: Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa

Guest performance kindly supported by Goethe-Institut and NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ Guest Performance Fund for Theatre, which is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, and the Departments of Culture and Arts of the German federal states.