Status: 08/10/2023 00:01
The International Summer Festival at Kampnagel started on Wednesday. 150 events take place at different locations in Hamburg. The organizers call them together: “A pop culture narrative about the present”.
If classic theater with plush armchairs and red curtains is too boring for you, you can find the International Summer Festival Kampnagel guarantees something. For example Nesterval– a Viennese performance group founded by director Martin Finland. Peter Helling visited the pop stars of contemporary theater at Baakenhöft.
Nesterval in the former cocoa storage facility in Hafencity
The Viennese performance artists can let off steam on 2,000 square meters of empty space. The former cocoa storage facility in Hafencity is a gigantic steel box. But now it looks different: 25 rooms have been created here, all separated by black fabric panels. Director Martin Finland walks the aisles:
“We’re in the labyrinth of our fictitious porcelain manufactory Nesterval, and if you just peek behind the doors, you can see the hidden corners – here’s a workers’ apartment,” says Martin Finland and pushes a curtain aside, behind it: original furniture from the 1930s years, heavy wooden chairs in the Gelsenkirchen baroque style, old newspapers, ashtrays, everything down to the matchbox is 80 years old, but it looks as if the residents have just left.
Further information
2 Min
Dance, exhibitions, concerts and theater are on offer from Wednesday. There are more than 150 events in total. 2 mins
Audience goes in groups from scene to scene
Just a few steps further, curtain up: a recreated scene at the fish market with a lifebelt and two benches. “We did a lot of research into where the places in Hamburg were where people came together to talk. That’s the fish market, for example,” according to Finland. Places where homosexuals met secretly. It’s about their persecution during the Nazi era. And in every room scenes are played in the evening, 160 in total were rehearsed by the theater group in Vienna and now adapted to Hamburg.The audience is divided into seven groups – you go from scene to scene, experience the stories of a nameless persecuted person up close, put them together like a jigsaw puzzle.
Story of trans woman Liddy Bacroff
“Nameless because most people know today that homosexual people have been persecuted, but very few have a specific story in mind,” says Finland. He and his team wanted to change that. Here the nameless homosexuals and trans people get their names back, for which the group has researched for two years. “For example, Liddy Bacroff, a woman from Hamburg – today we would read her as a trans woman, back then as a transvestite – was imprisoned, persecuted and then actually murdered in the concentration camp,” reports Martin Finland.
Further information
3 Min
The pink carpet was the stage for dazzling personalities and political messages. An honorary award went to Riccardo Simonetti. 3 mins
Nesterval connect stories with real places
In a small room full of desks and old typewriters, an office of the Gestapo headquarters in Hamburg has been created – in the town hall. The “sighing walk”, the torture methods used by the Nazis, gained notoriety. “I always think it’s nice that we try to include these real places, and of course the audience notices that and knows that when we talk about the ‘sighing’, they still have the exact images in their heads,” says Finland. The anxiety increases as you walk through the corridors, see the bars of a holding cell, a mountain of clothes, voices coming from somewhere – and this hypnotic swing music that immediately catapults you into the 20s, 30s.
The music comes from the canteen of the fictitious Nesterval porcelain factory. Martin Finland describes the purpose of this place like this: “In the evening, the secret meeting place and the heart of the story, a safe place, a ‘harbour in the harbour’, where people come together to be happy for a few hours.” Tables, a small stage – in between, exuberantly dancing couples, as if from the Nothing, men with men, women with women.
Nesterval want to change viewing habits
Nesterval’s pieces are sold out in Vienna in just a few minutes. They want to change viewing habits, want to reach all the senses. And have a highly political message: “We just see an incredibly reactionary wave rolling towards us and I think that’s exactly why now is the right time to stand up and fight back,” says Martin Finland.
Tickets for the Nersterval group can only be obtained via a waiting list. But otherwise it offers International summer festival at Kampnagel three weeks of full theatre, performance and concerts, with over 150 events.
Further information
Stage School students perform the musical about law student Elle Woods as a semester project. more
The former factory has long had an international reputation as one of the most important houses for contemporary forms of dance, theater and performance. more
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NDR Culture | The Morning | 08/08/2023 | 8:10 a.m