Postmigrant theatre: the Ballhaus Naunynstraße takes on sexual nationalism

Abstract

Theatre is seldom considered a major social or theoretical mover today; however, since its inauguration in 2008, the Ballhaus Naunynstraße theatre in Kreuzberg, Berlin, has been hugely instrumental in bringing the concept of postmigration into the public realm in Germany and beyond. Shermin Langhoff, the founding artistic director of the Ballhaus, explains that “postmigrant means that we critically question the production and reception of stories about migration and about migrants which have been available up to now and that we view and produce these stories anew, inviting a new reception”. As scholars such as Yasemin Yildiz highlight, one dominant “story” produced about migrants in recent years has involved a shift in means of othering from the ethnonational to religious, making for example, “Allah’s daughters” out of “Turkish girls”. Changing the subject in this way, has also allowed a discourse to emerge which positions Muslim migrants as a threat to “European” sexual and gender rights; a discourse also considered under the heading “sexual nationalism”. In this article I explore the narratives and gestures through which the theoretically aware postmigrant theatre as practised at the Ballhaus “views and invites a new reception of” this particular development. I suggest that not only does a broad view of the theatre’s repertoire over its first decade reveal a long-standing concern with and intervention into the intersection of discourses on sexuality, gender, and migration, but also that repeated scenarios of both stripping as punishment and more playful striptease emerge as a dominant gesture or even gestus in the theatre’s repertoire, even when sexuality or gender may not be central themes. Where might a gestic analytic, and a focus on viewing the theatre’s practices as active generator, rather than object, of theory, take academic engagements with sexual nationalism and postmigration?.