Searching for Language

Mehr Drama!: Sharon Dodua Otoo + Laura Uribe

In an illustration in orange and green, two people are walking up the stairs to the upper foyer of the Haus der Berliner Festspiele

In the second of three Mehr Drama! events Sharon Dodua Otoo and Laura Uribe present their texts to the Theatertreffen audience and then talk to the authors who nominated them for the project: Sasha Marianna Salzmann and Paula Thielecke.

Moderation Shirin Sojitrawalla
Dramaturgical Consultation Anna-Katharina Müller

Sharon Dodua Otoo: On the right side / Auf der rechten Seite

Norah, the mother of two sons, has lived in Berlin for years. She is due to take her naturalisation test soon, but one Sunday evening, watching Tatort on TV, her German suddenly disappears. She cannot understand anything anymore, she cannot read it and cannot speak it. All she has left is English. Her panic grows. How can she recover her language before this important test and above all continue to tell her own story? In On the right side / Auf der rechten Seite Sharon Dodua Otoo searches for her identity and her own voice in German society – humorously, succinctly and of course, bilingually.

Reading with
Leyb-Anouk Elias, Elijah Otoo, Tyrell Otoo and others

Talk between
Sharon Dodua Otoo and Sasha Marianna Salzmann

Selection Statement

“On the right side / Auf der rechten Seite is the first stage play by the writer Sharon Dodua Otoo. A clever, witty conversational drama about our present situation in Germany. The protagonist Norah is in her early 40s and has lived in Berlin since the 1990s. She has studied art, started a family and now works as a teacher. She leads a ‘German life’ until one morning she wakes up and realises her German has gone. There are only a few days left to go before her naturalisation test and all she can speak is English. She doesn’t understand her sons, she doesn’t understand the news on TV. We witnesses set off with her in search of what might have happened. Who has taken Norah’s German away?
Sharon Dodua Otoo succeeds not only in amazing her audience with her wit and a succession of new twists and turns, but in finding an amusing form for the absurdities of the current identity crisis. Her protagonist Norah not only challenges her surroundings, even the narrator of the story has to appear in person and justify her aesthetic decisions. A journey into a hall of mirrors no one can escape.”
– Sasha Marianna Salzmann

Laura Uribe: Backyard [Ein Suchgelände]

Enabling voices to be seen and heard that are otherwise absent in a European context also underlies Laura Uribe’s text Backyard [Ein Suchgelände], co-authored with Sabina Aldana. Since 2018 they have been searching for Mexico’s countless disappeared. They transpose their real research and their own experiences into an artistic (writing) practice that makes horrific crimes visible and gives the buried corpses a voice – as a warning, a memory, a form of resistance and as an act of solidarity.

Reading with
Yanina Cerón, Katia Fellin, Wiebke Jakubicka Yervis

Talk between
Laura Uribe and Paula Thielecke

Selection Statement

“As one of the playwrights participating in the Berlin Theatertreffen’s Mehr Drama! it was my task to select an emerging playwright. However, in this case the assignment of roles has shifted.
Laura Uribe’s artworks and perspective, created in co-authorship with the costume designer and art director Sabina Aldana, form the starting point of a learning process for me. I see the opportunity to highlight her work here as the extension of a queer feminist and transnational dialogue.
The text Backyard [Ein Suchgelände] stems from an artistic practice that questions the complex tensions between representation, appropriation and empathy, and challenges the European perspective. This raises key questions that Laura Uribe deals with in political, documentary and narrative terms.
How can someone from Europe represent realities and lived experience that are anchored in an entirely different political, historical and colonial context? And is it even possible to do so responsibly without acquiring experience? The assumption would be that a reciprocal, deeply felt empathy could lead to lived international solidarity on equal terms. A solidarity that is not based on pity but on an understanding of shared responsibility.
Laura Uribe’s tests are closely connected with the political reality of Mexico. In her artistic research, she examines the enduring violence against women and queer people along with the tireless search for the disappeared. Her work exposes the social wounds that femicide, feminicide and violent disappearance leave behind, and at the same time the large, collective, often informal structures of self-organisation, memory and resistance that counter this.
The frequently mentioned tensions between Latin American and Western influenced, white feminism manifest themselves not only in the fact that Western discourses often overlook histories of colonial and racist violence. This criticism is not aimed against individual persons, but against a European identity that continues to have global agency. Laura Uribe’s writing shows how thinking based on solidarity can successfully be applied to the arts. Her complex analyses do not remain abstract but become aesthetically, eloquently and humorously tangible. In her texts autobiographical and documentary elements combine in an entertaining, fictional framework with interviews, research material and the voices of those who have no capacity for artistic production themselves because, for example, they have pulled their brother’s body out of a field and must spend weeks to come searching for his head, to quote Laura Uribe with an exemplary description of the material reality of everyday resistance.
Laura Uribe’s works can be placed within an art that is progressive, political and at the same time enduring, that enables connection, community and responsibility to have a meaningful effect. Even if her works have already been presented internationally, I consider it not only imperative but ground-breaking that their protagonists should find much stronger international recognition.”
– Paula Thielecke

Performance rights Sharon Dodua Otoo, On the right side / Auf der rechten Seite: S. Fischer Theater & Medien, Frankfurt am Main
Backyard [Ein Suchgelände] is translated from Mexican Spanish by Franziska Muche