Eine Kirche der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir [A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within]

Having put himself centre stage as a man of passion and holy fool from the beginning of his career, the artist Christoph Schlingensief continues by making even his life-threatening cancer the stimulus and subject of a spectacular and moving theatrical action. The venue is decked out like a church. In an atmosphere of candles and incense, gospel singers, children in surplices and the actresses Angela Winkler and Margit Carstensen announce Schlingensief’s illness and provisional recovery. Shaky home movies from the Schlingensief family archive are projected onto a series of screens, along with footage of the patient in hospital, lying in bed and sobbing “Please don’t touch me!” “Eine Kirche der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir” [A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within] is on one hand a furious dramatization of a medical case file and a requiem composed by its subject during his own lifetime. On the other it is a homage to Schlingensief’s father figure Joseph Beuys and the artists of Fluxus, who regarded life (and death) itself as a work of art. An evening bold enough to risk being kitsch, extremely moving and with a directness seldom encountered in the theatre: a demonstration of poetry, grief and warmth which will surprise those who previously wished to misunderstand Schlingensief as a provocative and cynical clown.