In English with German surtitles

– Please note that strobe lights will be used during performances!

She was so attractive! Many felt irresistibly drawn to her — sometimes to their ruin, sometimes to their own liberation.

They came out of curiosity, for the city held a promise. Some sought refuge here from the violence of patriarchal societies, because Berlin offered them freedom — the possibility of reinventing themselves on their own terms. Or was it those who came who created this city of promise?

In Amigues Adios by Bishop Black, five performers embark on a search for Berlin’s promise, for the freedom of being together beyond the conservative boundaries of sexual identity and racial identity.

Around the turn of the millennium, those who came transformed the city into their harbour. They came ashore because rents were cheap, and where they came from mattered less than the here and now. Here, they shed the roles they had inherited in order to negotiate new ways of living together. Where have openness and freedom gone?

The five protagonists of Amigues Adios are still here. They remember the Black queer Berliners who, back then, had the courage to turn the city into a promise. They know precarity and those who collapsed under violence and cold. But they also know the beauty of that moment, when this city – so unexpected and improbable in light of Germany’s pasts – became an open city. And so they search for ways of keeping memory alive, and for art to revive community and freedom. In a surreal and burlesque dance through time, they come together to find the strength to carry on. They celebrate in order to taste again, on their tongues, the freedom from fear and the power of self-determination.

Amigues Adios is Bishop Black’s fourth work at Ballhaus Naunynstraße, following the solo performance Becoming My Body (2019), Re-Searching Joy (2022) as part of the akademie der autodidakten, and their directorial debut Flight of the Canaries (2023).