Performance / Catfight / Mousontum Frankfurt / HAU Berlin / 2014 - 2016

“Movies have power over us, but we have no power over them.” (bell hooks)

In one episode of Alison Bechdel’s comic strip "dykes to watch out for" from 1985, a character gives three rules for films, which have become widely known as the Bechdel Test: 1. The movie has to have at least two named women in it; 2. who talk with each another; 3. about something besides a man. The project Pixel Heroes oder Das Ende einer Dynastie takes up the questions and problems of representation in film. The three performers encounter their personal film heroes on stage and follow them between the world of dreams and the realities of their own lives.

Films provide more than simply a narrative for contemporary discourses: a shared experience, a mutual point of departure from which the audience enters into a dialog with the discourse being negotiated. Lea Schneidermann and her team reverse this relationship- building aspect: what if you could turn your life into a film – would it be systematically cast with personal heroes and produced regardless of all budgetary and aesthetic limitations? Pixel Heroes or the End of a Dynasty is your own life as a ham-packed scenographic miniature, filmic theatre dressed up as performance. And the reappropriation of a terrain supposedly already long lost to Hollywood.

Concept, Direction, Stage: Lea Schneidermann
Performance: Jungyun Bae, Georg Klüver-Pfandtner, Sylvia Lutz
Dramaturgy, Costumes: Arnita Jaunsubrēna
Stage assistant, Light: Laura Eggert
Sound: Caroline Creutzburg
Stage assistant: Kristin Gerwien

Previous Performances

5.12.2014, Institut für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft
28.3.2015, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm
29.3.2015, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm
25.5.2016, HAU 2, Performing Arts Festival Berlin

Supported by: Hessische Theaterakademie, Institut für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Kulturamt Frankfurt, Kulturamt Gießen, Frankfurt LAB, Gerda Weiler Stiftung.