The Dead Ladies Show is a series of entertaining and inspiring presentations on women who achieved amazing things against all odds. Every two months, the show hosts three passionate cheerleaders of too-oft forgotten women, inviting its loyal audience into a sexy séance (of sorts) celebrating these impressive icons, their turbulent lives, and deathless legacies.
Our new season is built around outstanding Berlin writers who share stories of awe-inspiring women who’ve fascinated them and influenced their work. Show number 25 – our silver anniversary! – brings you three women who wrote radical things in difficult times: an eroticist, an anti-authoritarian, and an anarchist. Presented by the multi-talented writer and translator SASKIA VOGEL, Vogue model, journalist, teacher, activist, and writer ANNETT GRÖSCHNER, and your beloved co-host FLORIAN DUIJSENS. All held together by your other firm favourite KATY DERBYSHIRE. Come on up to the ACUD Studio for an evening of entertainment, inspiration, and intimate information.
Presented in a messy mixture of English and German. €5 or €3 reduced entry. Once again generously supported by the Berliner Senat. Doors open 7:30 – come on time to get a good seat and a good drink!
ABOUT
Rut Hillarp
... was a Swedish Modernist poet and erotic genius (as her biographer put it). She was also an experimental filmmaker, photographer, teacher, diarist, and novelist. Born in 1914 to a hardware dealer and an evangelist mother, and committing suicide in 2003, she’s been called a grande dame of the Swedish women’s movement. After a rich life of writing, travelling, dancing, and taking love and sex seriously while teaching languages to high schoolers, she was discovered by a new generation in 1991: her work exhibited at the Stockholm national gallery, asked to design album covers, she even had her poems set to pop music. One of her key themes was the difficulties of sexual relationships in a male-dominated society. Saskia Vogel is her translator into English.
Helga M. Novak
... was a writer born in Berlin and grew up in the GDR. In 1961 she moved to Iceland, where she married, had two children, and got divorced. She made cathode-ray tubes, salted herring, and carpets, but also travelled to France, Spain, and the USA. After returning to East Germany to study creative writing, she was stripped of her citizenship for distributing copies of her critical texts and exiled. Always an outsider, she wrote poetry criticizing the East German state from the left, then autobiographical novels and nature poems. Wanting to move back in 2004, Novak was considered an unemployed foreigner and was initially refused a German residence permit. She managed it in the end.
Emma Goldman
... was an anarchist philosopher, activist, and writer. After emigrating from Russia to America at a young age in 1885, she helped plan a (failed) assassination, distributed information on birth control, and campaigned against conscription – until the Americans deported her to revolution-era Russia. Quickly disillusioned by its repression of independent thought, she left the Soviet Union in 1923 and wrote about the experience, as well as a two-volume autobiography. Her writing and lectures covered topics as undying as atheism, free speech, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. And yes, it’s “Red Emma” on that poster/mug/T-shirt saying: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.” It’s not a direct quote, but it’s not wrong either.