Parcours und Karte: Postmigrantische Erkundungen am Ballhaus Naunynstraße, ausgehend vom Theaterparcours Kahvehane. Turkish Delight, German Fright? (2008)

Abstract

The article deals with the theatre parcours Kahvehane – Turkish Delight, German Fright?, a walking performance that takes the audience to various Anatolian coffee houses in the Berlin districts Kreuzberg and Neukölln. Within these venues, international artists developed performative interventions trying to temporarily open these seemingly closed spaces to a new (theatre) audience. By leaving the theater building and entering the Kahvehane, however, the audience itself became an object of investigation. As the essay attempts to show, the parcours stages aesthetic as well as social tensions between self and other, between the known and the unknown by deploying different medial strategies, as it consists not only of the tour, but also of a catalog including a cartography and a typology of the Kahvehane. However, the documenting map and the ephemeral (theater) parcours are not presented as mutually exclusive strategies, but as media practices that necessarily complement each other in order to negotiate and historicize conf licts of the German migration society with performative means.