Der Popper

Two women meet by chance. They are very different. Maybe that's why they like each other. Or maybe they are simply lonely. A cautious friendship develops between the two. Theta breeds pigeons and takes Erike with her to her allotment garden. For Erike, it is as if a new world opens up. The friendship with the older Theta challenges her and makes her happy. But everything is finite. What remains are followers of civilization: pigeons and rats and flies and martens. This piece, in which Caren Jeß celebrates the fascination of their disgusting beauty, is also about them. Lyricism, lyrics, punk, prose and drama run wild, while the encounter of these two strange women is described in such a touching way that the heart keeps stopping with happiness.

What will we be left with when culture is lost? Caren Jeß knows how to transform even this dystopian question into addictive pleasure. Be it with the songs of the punk band The Toothbrushes, subtextual profundity or obscenely beautiful poems. And one thing becomes clear: as long as all this succeeds with such lustful exuberance, culture can't get lost at all.

Three men shoot JUST FOR FUN in an old dairy ruin. With schnapps and a self-made shooting figure. Marcus is Bastl's father and likes to have everything under control. Even Bastl, because otherwise he makes the wrong decisions. And Joost, because he's a really messed-up existence on speed. So the shooting fits quite well. Because it needs clear rules. It's just a shame that Malin also likes to roam the ruins. She's about 14 and has a thing for lost places, which give her the weirdest ideas for fantasy stories. Joost is supposed to chase her away. In vain. Malin meets him completely fearlessly. And even more. With her exaggerated seriousness, she uncovers an unexpected gentleness in Joost. Caren Jeß allows a strange friendship to grow on the fertile ground of heated male conversations, a friendship that is as fragile as it is fleeting. When Markus and Bastl find out that Joost didn't chase Malin away, they become suspicious. It's hard to trust someone like Joost that his interest is purely platonic. It doesn't seem fair - for the moment - because the happiness of this bizarre encounter weaves itself into the undergrowth of unwashed hair like a ray of sunshine. Faith, love, hope. There are brief flashes of the kind of person Joost could have become if his life hadn't gone completely wrong. "The right, the left, the centre strand. Your hair in my hands. The right, the left, the centre strand. Faith, love, hope, these three, feel how they slide into each other, faith, love, hope, these three, where have they been for so long? Where have you been, what have you been doing all this time? Faith, love, hope, say, where have you been?"

The peacock, the dirty bastard, has had tough luck – already when his mother got rid of his egg in the dark forest. He hatched nevertheless and became criminal, of course. Dirty as he is, nobody can see his beauty. On the contrary. The sparrow, the spaz, disses him, and social welfare gives him words of comfort, but no television. The buzzard has stopped talking and the flamingos are sick of turning in circles for ever. Marsh tit Veroniko doesn’t want to be reduced to his beauty and the pigeon in the garbage dreams of baroque debauchery. In seven comic-poetic miniatures, Caren Jeß describes the depths of the human soul in plumage and has them flower as strangely beautifully as the self-absorbed narcissus in the LGTB vegetation in the cracks of the cobblestones.

"Social skills, yo." Fortunately Kevin, Aslan and Özgür don't have to take part in this bullshit anymore. They prefer to run away from their crimes in the endless loop of the prison yard. And there's actually a lot to run away from here: Dead pregnant women, slit-up prostitutes, hearts torn out, honor killings. By comparison, Aslan's stolen car is rather a trifle. But barbed wire connects. Aslan, do the lion, they call to him. But he's too embarrassed. Aslan only begins to roar when Özgür's feelings force him to ask the question of WHY and the (prison yard) world simply collapses.

Comically coarse and poetically tender, Caren Jeß describes the ambivalence of a potent and brutal-looking society that gets cracks when it is forced to deal with the deeper layers of its counterpart. An incredibly feminine view of male behavioral patterns.

A woman arrives at an unknown place by the sea. She doesn't know yet that she is about to tell intimate stories about her life. But suddenly this strange creature appears, which knows exactly how to make the woman talk. The creature is called Morpho Peleides and is undergoing a metamorphosis, for the development of which it feasts on unpleasant things. Well-formulated narratives, beautiful images? No, give me your innermost!

Kitsch is an autofictional play that drills into its subject like a stomach probe. Eating disorder and gender identity, sexual trauma and life fatigue. All of this seems harsh and yet is so familiar to many. But what does it actually mean, is it helpful when we reveal our emotions, or are we catering to a voyeurism that is becoming increasingly desensitized to stark images and true events? Oh, and who is that droll boy who always shows up when you least expect him? Is he really there, or is he just a figment of the imagination, like perhaps everything else here in this strange place by the sea, originating where addiction originates: in the mind?

Caren Jeß has written yet another piece that stretches the boundaries of the imaginable to the unimaginable and at the same time makes so much understandable that could hardly be described otherwise.

The artistic team around Miriam Ibrahim deals with the topic of collective and transgenerational trauma through racist violence. How do the painful experiences of our ancestors inscribe themselves in our bodies and in our behaviour? Together, the team explores ways of remembering and rediscovering, shedding light on how we deal with history and the present. The play's development focuses on the genocide of the Herero and Nama people in Namibia by the German colonial power from 1904 to 1908.

The fictional characters of the play, a Black granddaughter and her white grandmother, are enriched by real experiences of the two actresses. They step out of their roles and contextualise themselves again and again against the background of changing video and image material. Anger and repression meet impatience and surrender. The past demands the responsibility of the present. Motifs and questions resurface so often until they culminate in a dialogue of understanding. The love between granddaughter and grandmother rubs up against the socio-political discrepancy that defines it. In this way, the characters take an emotional and critical look at a subject that reaches far beyond the cosmos of the private sphere. (Augsburg State Theatre)

Sara Sams and Ann Kudam meet at an aerobics class. They couldn't be more different. Ann, a conscientious ophthalmologist, single mother, introvert, with an irrepressible urge to damage her own skin, finds herself unexpectedly confronted with the self-confident, unattached and fun-loving Sara. Because Sara doesn't let Ann withdraw again, something develops between the two that Ann eventually tenderly calls ‘heartship’. They are both angry. But while Ann's anger is directed against herself, Sara's anger erupts every month in furious and explosive speeches at the feminist association Gynta e.V.'s social evening in a bar called – how could it be otherwise – “Heartship”. At some point, Ann Kudann and Sara Sams take the floor together and simply sail away from the patriarchy with their heartship. An angry, funny, sensitive, tender and wonderfully encouraging play for two strong actresses who want to joyfully unhinge the patriarchy for one evening. And preferably every day anew. ‘Your violence is not the block of ice that our heartship is wrecked on.’

A humanities scholar stands in front of a painting. A still life. In this still life sits the protagonist. Let's call him Frank. A prime example of his epoch - the Biedermeier. But the 19th century is over. We no longer live in a monarchy, and we reject authority. We like to form our own opinions! Don't we, Frank? But what's left of the retreat into the private sphere? Since the pandemic at the latest, sofa landscapes have once again become the favorite retreat of the middle class, and isn't the so-called petty bourgeois experiencing a revival? There's a fire outside, and no one is raising their fists. Where does this disenchantment with politics and the fear of finally changing things that so urgently need a turnaround come from? When will the fight for the necessary change begin? Probably when it's too late. Or isn't it already?

Caren Jeß dissects social change and its side effects. "The struggle for more justice remains in the headlock of reactionary conditions. People put on new clothes from time to time, but inside they remain the same." (Announcement Theater Heidelberg)

Eleos is a score of rage. Very lightly, almost fleetingly, beginning with a foreboding, the rage increases from the clueless to the evil. With poetic precision and filigree rhythm, Caren Jeß composes an oppressively beautiful cacophony of darkness from 36 miniatures. Her indignations tell of frustration and rejection, dejection, fear, violence and hatred. They tell of unsuspecting and premeditated rage, of humiliation, insult and again and again of the pain that underlies all rage. Caren Jeß transforms this abysmal feeling into a disturbingly beautiful symphony of language, sound and form. Inescapably funny and tragic at the same time.

Eleonore is a woman. Until one day she realises that she is actually a cat. Because she is financially independent and single, nothing really stands in the way of her transformation. She has a cat-skin suit sewn for her and gradually dehumanises her eating, sleeping and social behaviour. In head conversations with Dr. Wildbruch, a therapist who is fascinated by her feline behaviour, it becomes clear that Eleonore's thinking also increasingly resembles that of a cat. Her distancing from human modes of perception, which are far from rivaling those of a cat, is so comprehensibly described that the transformation of her life sounds far more than understandable. One might even say enticing.

At the same time, Eleonore is caught in the impossibility of actually being a cat as a human being. Biology cannot be outwitted, despite all the adaptations. Nevertheless, she adapts as much as possible. In the end, her life consists only of hunting mice in the garden and sleeping, a reduction to instinct and drive. Eleonore's monologue tells the story of how her senses expand and society becomes absolutely irrelevant, with a language that in its delicate poetic precision comes very close to the essence of a cat - despite all its ambivalence. For the retreat of man into absolute privacy also poses the pressing question of the responsibility we must bear as individuals as part of a functioning society.

Caren Erdmuth Jeß, named Young Playwright of the Year in 2020 by the magazine Theater heute, has written a new play for the drama section of Ausweitung des Ringgebiets. Jeß, who always works rhythmically and tonally with her vivid language, takes her starting point in Die Walküren from Wagner's constellations of characters and motifs, but exaggerates the material, driving it into the grotesque and shifting the focus to the female characters. She develops her play from the choral force, anger and longing of the Valkyries: she lets powerful songs ring out at dizzying heights, while below, the other characters, all following base motives, go about their ludicrous activities. These are the excesses of a world that seems far removed from our own, yet always bears an uncanny resemblance to it. Like Jeß herself, who (as her alter ego ‘Erdmuth’) directly confronts the megalomania of Wagner's world-building in some of the most exciting passages of the play – between text, discursive authorial commentary and informative chatty stage directions – the Valkyries are on a collision course with the ‘national poet’. In his very comical silk slipper, for example, they encounter ingenious self-marketing strategies and, as timeless “old hands”, counter the patriarchal claims of Wotan and Wagner. ‘We keep the runes in embers and strike and bend them so that you will not recognise your heritage,’ they threaten. In Jeß's version of the material, the ‘heritage’ is clearly recognisable. But so are the legitimate questions that need to be asked about it. (Announcement by the Staatstheater Braunschweig)