1 9 Monologue

2021-23, Performance monologue

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The personal experience of being a body home to pathogens flows into this autobiographical performance text while building a bridge between precise self-observation and a global, historical and literary outside. While many in Europe consider it long since eradicated, it still presents one of the deadliest infectious diseases worldwide. In the Romantic period, it was the epitome of muse and poetry and a popular motif in painting, literature and music. As the "firstborn of the mother of pestilence and disease," it has accompanied the primate human through the eras since time immemorial. Today it is a curable disease, yet more than 1.5 million people worldwide fall victim to it every year*. Its social perception has changed fundamentally throughout the epochs: from the glorified malaise of the romantic Bohemian poets through the painful proletarian death during the industrial revolution to the antisocial illness of the lepers during National Socialism. Today it is considered the disease of the marginalized, the dependent and the destitute, hardly noticed by the common public. The talk is about tuberculosis. ​

 

* 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 subjectivation, 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, author and director

 

A monologue that overflows from exquisite thought images vacillating between pain and amazement, philosophy and feeling, intelligence and the will to understand, emotional wisdom and helpless observation. 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, dramaturge

 

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, philosopher

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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, artist