ANDROGYNOUS - Portrait Of A Naked Dancer

»Anita Berber lived in times of uncertainty, just before the rise of the Nazi regime. I live in times of uncertainty, just before…I don’t know what. One hundred years ago, Anita died in a hospital in Kreuzberg. She was only 28. Today, I’m 31 and I’m not planning to die young.«

ANDROGYNOUS is a project by Lola Arias in collaboration with River Roux, a performer and pole dancer, who has navigated genders and spaces, challenging taboos through her artistic practice. Alongside Bishop Black and Dieter Rita Scholl, Roux retraces the steps of Anita Berber and other legendary figures of 1920s Berlin. Though Berber’s life was brief, her legacy endures: she transgressed norms through performances charged with gender ambiguity, eroticism, horror, and ecstasy. Yet her entanglement with Berlin’s counterculture is often reduced to scandal.

In a space that resembles a night-club and a cabaret theater, the performers embody their alter egos from hundred years ago. On stage, they reconstruct - with the help of critics, photos, silent films and police reports- dances and performances that were radical and provocative for a society that was just coming out of the First World War. What remains of these legendary performances that were censored and cancelled by the rising conservatism at the end of the Weimar era? How can we reconstruct an art if all we know from it is what’s written in police reports? How much of the art that we make today will be censored and gone tomorrow?

Travelling in time, mixing the stories of 1920’s artists with the lived experiences of today’s night performers, ANDROGYNOUS explores the complex entanglements of resistance – foregrounding the role of counterculture in creating spaces of care, dissent, and collective survival in times of crisis.