Black Tie

By Helgard Haug / Daniel Wetzel

The only thing she got from the adoption agency about the time before the first document is the mythical information “You were found in a box in South Korea in 1977, wrapped in newspaper”. For “Black Tie”, Miriam Yung Min Stein spits into a tube from the company 23andMe, takes a swab with a “genome collector” from the company DeCODEme, and waits for the two market leaders to partially sequence her genome. One of the companies greets her on its website that will reveal her genetic data with the slogan “welcome to you”. Could your individual “construction plan” be your biography? How do you tell your own story when, as in Stein‘s case, its documentation begins only with arrival at a German airport?
“Black Tie” circles the black hole of origins, the strangely eloquent and “helping” young human genetics industry of these times, and the alienation between my environment and myself – growing in Osnabrück into a body that looks Korean, that carries within it an entire country, a war, another culture, as if in a closed capsule, unknown, speechless – a potential place, a vanishing point, a dream factory.
Adoption, anonymous sperm donation, Christmas parcels for orphaned children – are good people aware of the growing black holes that their good also creates? What would happen if all international aid were stopped? How could the helpers be helped, who are addicted to doing good and expect the thanks they deserve for it? And what was printed on the newspaper in which the baby was wrapped in South Korea in 1977?
After three pieces with great texts as their object – Schiller‘s “Wallenstein”, the first volume of Marx’s “Capital” and the evening news in “Breaking News” – this new work turns a microscopic gaze on the “script” of a life.

 

 

With: Miriam Yung Min Stein, Hye-Jin Choi and Ludwig

Book: Helgard Haug & Daniel Wetzel. Co-Author: Miriam Yung Min Stein

Stage direction: Helgard Haug & Daniel Wetzel (Rimini Protokoll)
Research and dramaturgy: Sebastian Brünger
Stage set and Lightingdesign: Marc Jungreithmeier
Music: Ludwig
Interaction design: Grit Schuster
Interaction design assistant: Tobias Üffinger
Sound: Florian Fischer
Production management: Heidrun Schlegel
Assistant director: Dorit Abiry
Assistant stage designer: Sina Gentsch
Production intern: Dimitris Bampilis

A Rimini Apparat production in co-production with Hebbel am Ufer Berlin and the Theaterhaus Gessnerallee Zurich, in cooperation with the Wiener Festwochen.

Funded by the Governing Mayor of Berlin – Senate Chancellery – Cultural Affairs.

Performance rights: schaefersphilippen Theater und Medien GbR

www.schaefersphilippen.de