I was 7 7 2 1 7 8
Rimini Protokoll explores identity in Black Tie
Süddeutsche Zeitung, Peter Laudenbach, 19.12.2008, Chars
To the eternal question of existential philosopher Robert Lembke "What am I?", Miriam Yung Min Stein has a startling answer: "I was 77 2178. I am Park Yung Min." A few days after her birth, thirty one years ago, she was laid, wrapped in newspaper, in front of the town hall in Seoul, South Korea. The "77" in the number the authorities gave the nameless baby probably stands for 1977. Her name, Park Yung Min, is just as impersonal. The clerk who came up with it simply made it up out of the most common Korean names, "like Sabine Müller or Erika Mustermann", says Park Yung Min, whose name is now Miriam Stein. She stands on the stage of Berlin’s HAU theatre, part of a theatre production by directors Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel. The name of this new piece by the directors’ collective Rimini Protokoll is "Black Tie".
But what Miriam Stein is telling us about is not a theatre piece, it’s her life. "This evening I will say “I” 276 times without exactly knowing who I mean." Anyone given only a number and a run-of-the-mill name at birth, who doesn’t even know who the passer-by was who found the baby they once were, has a great deal to work through to create even a fragile and contradictory identity. The changes of name from 77 2178 through Park Yung Min to Miriam Stein are the least of the problems in this complex construction of identity. The change of countries is more complicated.
The Korean child grew up with German adoptive parents in Osnabruck: "I landed, aged nine months." That has consequences: "You see only people who look German. You look in the mirror and you look different from the way you feel. You’re always told, “You must be grateful."
One paradox of this evening of theatre about something as intimate as the gaps in a biography is that it is theatre - something genuinely public. The photos of her German adoptive parents that Miriam Yung Min Stein shows on stage are both as private as possible and part of a larger, public narrative. Conversely, nothing could be more personal, intimate and wounding than the dry facts she presents about the Korean adoption business and its conditions. A society that regards illegitimate babies as a moral scandal, a country that disposes of its abandoned babies in Western countries, aid organisations that procure babies from Korean orphanages for Europeans and Americans, organising the baby export. Practical for South Korea, nice for the adopting parents.
Miriam Stein outlines the facts soberly and completely without teary sentimentality. The more drily she describes the global adoption business, the clearer its obscenity becomes. "Angelina Jolie has ruined the price of African babies." The fact that the viewer does not become a voyeur is due on the one hand to the impressive Miriam Stein herself, who puts her own life into a larger context very reflectively, with mockery and polemic, but free of all self-pity. She breaks down apparent ‘givens’, such as those that adoptive parents can expect gratitude, with intelligence, rage and precision. This is also due to the parameters set by the production, with appearances by a musician and another Korean living in Berlin, for example, and with a stage design incorporating the human genome as mapped by Craig Venter.
For all its documentary clarity, the Rimini piece is anything but a sticky-sweet public soul searching. Rather it is a carefully-constructed performance, which is on many levels about that most essential thing: identity.
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