1 9 Monologue

2021-ongoing, Performance monologue

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The experience of one’s own body as a host to pathogens is woven into this autofictional performance text, which bridges the gap between precise self-observation and the global, historical and literary outside.

 

Whilst many in Europe consider it to have been eradicated, it remains the deadliest bacterial infectious disease worldwide. In European Romanticism, it embodied the muse and poetry and appeared frequently in painting, literature, and music. Today it is curable, and yet, year after year, over 1.5 million people* worldwide still die from it. Its social perception has changed fundamentally over the ages: from the glorified malaise of the bohemian poets, through the agonising proletarian death of the Industrial Revolution, to the ‘asocial’ disease of the lepers during the Nazi era. Today, it is regarded as a disease affecting marginalised groups – one that receives too little public attention. Yet it is more than that – tuberculosis (TB) is a social disease perpetuated by existing global, structural inequalities.​

 

* WHO World Health Organization Fact Sheet (as of October 2021)

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A daring and quite unique piece of dance-cum-performance art opened my eyes to a new way of looking at tuberculosis. ... All of us underwent a complete shift in our attitude towards TB, which is really a remarkable thing for a 70-minute performance art piece to accomplish. Bravo!

DANCE ART JOURNAL London

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1 9 Monologue offers unescapable concreteness and a radical subjectivization, which is declared valuable. Through densely conveyed personal experience, Stenke draws our radical connection to nature, death, forces we cannot control, and the enigmas of our origins. Because literature is this: condensed experience. 

Andreas Liebmann

 

This is a monologue that overflows with exquisite thought images vacillating between pain and amazement, philosophy and feeling, intelligence and the will to understand, emotional wisdom and helpless observation. It is a reliving of a summer in which everything was on a razor-edge, a life-threatening moment, or even a moment that ultimately questions life or the right to live.

Stephan Knies

 

A text that gains its great strength by combining the accuracy of introspection with a position from outside, oscillating between poetry and prose, poem and report.

Dr Ralf Peters

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A text that wants to and needs to be close.

A piece to let yourself be caressed by when life once again turns too concrete. 

Marcel Sparmann