Performance Double Bill
Karol Filo & Mike Dele Dittrich Frydetzki , Non-Violent Bodies (solo) & East German Fragilities – Lust auf Gewalt
Two solos, two young positions, two debates on Eastern Germany and Eastern Europe in the Nineties: Karol Filo looks at the Czech Republic and Slovakia in the 1990s. The brutality exhibited by extreme right-wing skinheads is confronted by waves of anti-fascist counter-violence. The Slovakia-born theatre and video artist observes the time and puts it into relation to the non-violent ideal.
Mike Dele Dittrich Frydetzki becomes Maik, that little small-town boy, that little coward, that waify yob. In a semi-fictional encounter with their own past, Mike wonders what it could have meant to grow up as a white boy in 1990’s Eastern Germany. In queer self-presentation between helplessness and intimidation, Maik claims a different perspective.
At the start: Introduction by Carena Schlewitt, Artistic Direction HELLERAU - European Centre for the Arts, Dresden
Invited to the Osten (Bitterfeld-Wolfen) as well as the KRIK (Skopje) festivals as well as to HAU (Berlin) for a residency and a presentation.
Karol Filo is a Slovak-born, Prague-based interdisciplinary artist and performer whose work explores the intersections of documentary performance, social imagination, and personal narrative. He studied Alternative and Puppet Theatre at DAMU in Prague and completed internships at HKU in Utrecht and AVU in Prague. His documentary performances "language barrier equal" and "The Good Times Are Over" won the "Project of the Year" award (2022, 2025) at the Příští vlna/Next Wave Festival. He also presented The Good Times Are Over at HELLERAU, where he subsequently took part in the Dreaming 90 residency and presented the work Non-Violent Bodies on the cultural forum Transformation Forever. He created and presented his works in the Czech Republic, in Slovakia, the Netherlands, in France, Germany, Hungary, and Martinique. He deals with topics such as closeness, polarisation, violence, morality, resistance, power hierarchies, propaganda, and colonialism, which interest him mainly apart from the stage, and therefore he explores them in real situations, relationships, internal conflicts, and imaginations. He combines documentary, theatrical, film, conceptual and ethnographic approaches as well as wish fulfilment. His artistic practice is based on research through which he seeks to understand reality. He therefore interacts with it and observes how different actors transform each other.
Mike Dele Dittrich Frydetzki is an artist and cultural scholar. They work as a performer, director, dramaturge, driver, and as the artistic direction of theatre and performance projects and festivals. Their main focus lies on the reflection of their own post-Eastern German origin history, queer-feminist questions and solidary, collective work practices. Mike studied Applied Theatre, Media and Cultural Sciences in Hildesheim, Gießen, and Warsaw. Mike almost never works alone.
Non-Violent Bodies (solo) by Karol Filo is in English, East German Fragilities – Lust auf Gewalt by Mike Dele Dittrich Frydetzki in German.
Trigger warning: Non-Violent Bodies (solo) von Karol Filo: Violence, discrimination, death.
Karol Filo: Non-Violent Bodies
In Non-Violent Bodies, Karol Filo ventures into 1990’s Slovakia. A period in which part of society believed the political nature of everyday life had dissolved into the free market neo-liberal dream and individual competition. Simultaneously, members of the anti-fascist movement closely observed the activities of right-wing and neo-Nazi skinheads, oftentimes opting for counter-violence. In the tension between the European fantasy of non-violence and the lived reality of physical confrontation, Karol Filo, in this lecture performance, explores what it means to defend oneself as well as marginalised groups.
Author/Performer: Karol Filo; Ko-Autor*in Text: Radek Wollmann; Dramaturgical support: Viktor Prokop, Orin Rodrigues; Artistic Advisors: Gosia Wdowick, Ira Brand, Robert Smolík; Production: Unkulunkulu, KLAS CREW. Sepcial thanks: Janka Dold, Tobiáš Nevřiva, Sodja Lotker, HELLERAU, Studio ALTA, KALD DAMU, Malá inventúra, ART-IN-RES, Naplaveno.
Mike Dele Dittrich Frydetzki: East German Fragilities – Lust auf Gewalt
In this semi-fictional encounter with their own past, Mike becomes Maik and starts questing for their own childhood in 1990’s Eastern Germany. Maik intrudes into the narrative of Eastern German masculinity of the post-reunification period, to dismantle it from the inside. What effects does the experience of defencelessness in the presence of (right-wing) violence have on the lives and the self-perception of adolescents? How do aggression, fear, and adaptation inscribe themselves into the bodies?
In a queer self-staging with t-shirt slogans, power posing, rap, and drag performance, between feelings of helplessness and masculinist threatening gestures, Mike ventures out to claim a different perspective
Conzept/Performance: Mike Dele Dittrich Frydetzki; Scenography: Raiko Sánchez; Costume: Iggi Meerstein; Music: Sophia Ziesch (Ida Bux); Dramaturgy: Maria Rössler; Object: Torsten Rötzsch.
Co-produced by MDDF/Die Soziale Fiktion GbR with HELLERAU – European Centre for the Arts in the programme focus “Spurensuche” (“Retracing”). This was supported with funds from the Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur (Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship). Additionally, the focus receives funding as part of the Alliance of International Production Houses from funds provided by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as well as from the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxonia. This action is being co-financed through tax money on the grounds of the budget sanctioned by the Saxonian parliament.
Funded as part of the Alliance of International Production Houses by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
