As the first live performance at the Sophiensaele in Mitte, iHeartBerlin friend Olympia Bukkakis is giving her all in the new show “Too Much” that blends drag, performance, dance, and theater into one immersive 90-minute happening.
Based on her own experiences as a drag performer, the Queen of the Heavens and of the Earth, Empress of Despair, and Architect of Your Eternal Suffering devotes herself to the special relationship between performer and audience. What role do language and movement conventions play? How do they influence the special dynamic between those who watch and those who act – and who does that exclude? Using her drag skills, Olympia Bukkakis subverts the valid rules and creates personae for the various performance formats: Mistakes from the rehearsal replace virtuosic performance, and between a weather reports, an ancient Greek monologue, a cello solo and a talk show – with Oozing Gloop as special guest – languages are garbled and mixed, assumptions about the audience are dismissed. Performance archetypes are knocked from their pedestals, in order to make room for those locked out of the normative audience/performer relationship. By undertaking the impossible task of conjuring all these varied genres within one single performance, Olympia Bukkakis will create moments of connection, disruption, euphoria, and tragedy.
Foto © Ceren Saner
