Like Lovers Do

Five best friends are imagining a future that will revolve around their dream men. Songlike dedications are addressed to their beloved. But wait – what do sexualised violence, toxic role images and the mythical character of the Medusa have to do with this? In her poetic and powerful text, Sivan Ben Yishai holds up a mirror to patriarchal gender models. Five strong actors form a kind of narrating body in Pınar Karabulut’s fast-paced production, which employs language and movement to translate Ben Yishai’s text into a score of almost painful directness.

Statement of the jury
Sivan Ben Yishai’s text is a darkly poetic “song” about structural sexism and sexualised violence, heaping dedication upon dedication: to all those who humiliate, hurt and kill with words and deeds, but also to those who turn a blind eye and those like Athena, who punishes Medusa for being raped by Poseidon. None of these things are actually seen on stage; no selfie-sticks zooming in on vaginas dripping with sperm, no bloody acts of castration, no individual stories of suffering. Pınar Karabulut’s five lamenters are gender-fluid creatures, visibly marked by pop culture’s duty to entertain. Dressed in alien-superhero-punk-costumes, their movements range from machine-like to ritual and they let their platinum wigs fly. But this intelligent positing certainly does not downplay the issue. The whole thing remains uncomfortable, even if in a different way than the text does: It is too loud, too shrill – all the way to the tongue-in-cheek ending that tries out various forms of empowerment.

Tojuror Sabine Leuchtʼs video statement in the Berliner Festspiele Media Library (in German)