(English with german surtitles)

Gritty Glamour takes us backstage in a Kreuzberg club. Four artists: Maria Sumak, golden voice of electro music and night life queen; Mad Rage, punk-feminist performer; Molina Puig, dancer and it girl, and Greta Dietrich, grande dame of West-Berlin drag chanson. While one of them at a time is on stage, they tell each other stories of their lives in kaleidoscopic moments and engage with their respective understanding of community, sex, love, Diaspora, family and the relationship between their everyday and stage persona. The play raises questions concerning the visibility of queer, post-migrant artists and addresses racist attributions in the dominant white queer scene.
All of the performers are artists and figures from Berlin’s nightlife. The play interrogates the visibility of queer post-migrant artists and the role racist attributions play in a dominantly white queer scene. The artists’ diverse artistic forms of expression and perspectives are celebrated in a night of performance, juxtaposed in dialogue with one another and fictionalised. Based on interviews, the experiences and stories each participant brings with them are brought to the stage, reflecting a part of the life of the protagonists in Berlin. A life in contradictory worlds, often very close to precarity, where the exploration of boundaries, of sexuality, is part of the norm and the individual self is in a constant process of negotiation. The performers slip into the roles of their counterparts, take on their identities ‒ and in an equally interdisciplinary involvement with music, text, video and dance they also keep re-negotiating the form of what happens on stage.