Together with their guests, She She Pop’s performers are working on a new theatrical format. The performers use their bodies and their accumulated physical shame as visual material.ĥ0 Grades of Shame is concerned with creating, viewing, modifying and reinterpreting imagery: images in the form of ideals and norms, images of collective and individual desire, images as concrete examples, and as pornography, caricature and subversive collage. What is sex? What makes a woman a woman? What makes a man a man? What does a child know? The pan-generational teachers in 50 Grades of Shame rises to this challenge. Yet despite all these doubt and unease, sex education is still necessary. Imparting knowledge is a form of penetration, just one kind of lewd sex game among many. Even the most private declarations about desire, reproduction, gender specificity, and so on, are ideologies they are smoke and mirrors, banal, dull or fictitious.
The experience of sex is constantly changing – it is historical, political, biographical, and conditioned by specific contexts. The experienced elderly stand next to innocent youth, or vice versa: no position is secure and nobody has reliable knowledge. Through monstrous or simple presentations, and constantly shifting poses, different generations and genders, real bodies and fantastic figments expose.
#NAKED AND FUNNY 2016 SERIES#
On two large panels onto which cross-fade images are projected, the different actors – old and young, children, women and men – are staged in a series of encounters. Based on Wedekind’s utopian models of education, the stage here serves as an educational institution and She She Pop and their guests form a faculty within it. James’ erotic novel 50 Shades of Grey with older, younger and very young guests from the Berlin dance, performance and theatre scene. After its premiere last March in Munich, She She Pop are now showing a new version of their picture album inspired by Wedekind’s Spring Awakening and E.L.