M.Photo: © Rita Lino, 2020
M., Photo: © Rita Lino, 2020 
Anna Gien und Marlene StarkPhoto: Julien Menand
Anna Gien und Marlene Stark, Photo: Julien Menand 
 

M.

by Anna Gien and Marlene Stark
Direction: Sarah Kohm
World Premiere
Studio

In a version by Sarah Kohm

After a short period of hype, M’s success as an artist was already over. She is fed up with the still sexist, male-dominated art business that forces her, as a woman, to choose between precarious living conditions and career prostitution. She prefers to DJ in Berlin clubs. At least there she has control — over her life and the men she sleeps with. And although her strap-on dildo only ejaculates fake sperm, her feeling of active domination and superiority is real and the reversal of power structures works, at least for the time being. Is this payback? Can the apparently all-powerful patriarchy really be so easily sabotaged? In loosely linked episodes, a portrait emerges of a woman in her early thirties, meandering through a hedonistic metropolitan environment in which sex ultimately must provide everything at the same time: excess and total intimacy, self-realisation and empowerment. Anna Gien and Marlene Stark’s debut novel »M.« could be the psychological profile of a self-referential generation disenchanted by the promises of a career: too young to give up their dreams, too old to really believe in them anymore. For the graduation production of her directing degree of the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, Sarah Kohm is collaborating with the ensemble to explore the relationship between art and pornography — and how female desire can be formulated beyond the male gaze.

Direction: Sarah Kohm
Costume Design: Lotta Zeit
Dramaturgy: Angelika Schmidt, Marcus Peter Tesch

Co-production with the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg.