A full-on trash-caberet critiquing European Union politics and the refugee crisis. The audience is on a sinking boat; the band plays on and someone is singing karaoke. The costumes are of the thinnest fabrics; the wigs are plentiful and are not on straight. Popcorn is popped while a dissection of Miss Europa incarnate takes place. What is the problem, Dr. Strangelove? Never mind, nothing a little plastic surgery can't cover up. A game of musical chairs determines who shall walk the plank first.
While I had begun splashing, then swimming in the circles of the UdK stage design students starting in late 2016 with FANTOMOJ and again in 2018 with Das Kunstraubkabinett, an intimate alliance with one of their number gained me a place in their next outing, in their avatar as the semi-formalized collective FCDU (Federal Civil Defense Union, formerly Federal Civil Defense Admösistration [sic]). Crystallized around director and theatremaker Katja Czellnik during her guest professorship at the UdK and her subsequent direction of the 2017 K.O.-Projekt, Desolation, several of the students began to work with her in extracurricular contexts, putting on Mime, Marx, Mutationen February 2017 at the Oper Halle in their performance series "Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft", aimed at digesting the monumental works of Marx and Wagner. I first encountered the group performing Exodus es o sechsunddreißig, an installation-performance about the rise in Berlin real estate and gentrification, presented as a series of scenes in the different rooms of West Germany/NOrth Europe—the groups most-frequent base—with gongs, crystals, an endlessly-rotating döner skewer, development models, and a pushy mogul trying to sell them. The audience rotated through each of the rooms in small groups, before returning to the centre to hear special news report about the whole thing, after which the döner meat was unrolled and they all did a line dance.
Lafisinsiär was similar, with a long development process of kicking around all number of theoretical and farcical ideas before meeting over a weekend or two, picking out costumes1, and throwing everything together. I took on the role of a hirsute cameraman following perhaps the same news reporter as the one from Exodus, documenting part of the performance with a live video feed (which didn't really work over the poor WiFi connection I had attempted to set up) and running the lights and sound in the meantime. It was perhaps the most chaotic, and certainly the most outrageous, performance I had ever done; probably exactly for those reasons did the audience seem to have such a good time.
I followed up this piece with Katja and Martin Miotk's No Free Tete, in which aliens/Egyptian gods solve the woes of the jobless, and Die neue Mieter, a guerilla-projection performance during the Coronavirus Pandemic.