BLACK VIRGINS

By Feridun Zaimoğlu and Günter Senkel
Performances 20th–21st / 23rd–25th / 27th–30th March 2010, 20 h

The outrage over the "gob garbage" in the women’s extremely anti-modern utterances remained a luxury for me to the end. Feridun Zaimoğlu

Black Virgins consists of monologues based on interviews which Feridun Zaimoğlu and Günter Senkel held with young neo-muslim women in Germany. It was nominated one of the best seven plays in 2007 at the festival Mülheimer Theatertage. In Neco Çelik’s theatre debut the Black Virgins ask why Allah is not a foreigner and why godly crimes are necessary, how fluffy Islam can be halal and why you wake up with fleas after having sex with the godless. And last but not least they look for the perfect symbiosis: of sex and Islam. They follow the pious thesis that nakedness does not mean faithlessness and to be fully bandaged does not mean being totally subjected to God.

Çelik’s production very cleverly does without any form of outward theatricalisation. It emphasizes the documentary and takes its strength from this… the stage design plays on the voyeuristic effect that is inevitable when members of the social majority gaze at an environment that is strange to them and usually only accessible via media distortion. Peter Laudenbach, Süddeutsche Zeitung