“I am Anna. I was conceived while Madonna was satisfying herself on stage. I am socialized christian. I am female socialized. I become bulimic. I find out: bulimia literally means bull hunger. First it disgusts me, then it turns me on. I need to see a bull for real. I want to know why bulls feel like they come from inside my bulimic imagery. I want to know what happens to my now ex-bulimic body when I learn how to bullfight.”
Anna Kirstine Linke throws themself and their inner bulls into the autofictional arena. Between heaven and hell, the Pope and Madonna, as bullfighter and bull, Linke asks whether eating disorders* are protests against binary or sexist structures, or how these structures produce eating disorders*.
With bulimic beats and looping equipment, Linke brings together history(s) of eating disorders*, bullfighting and the desire to queer binaries on the battlefield of their body until their body becomes a dancefloor.
Author, director, performer and bodyworker Anna Kirstine Linke studied Philosophie-Künste-Medien in Hildesheim, directing at the HfMT and the ZHdK & believes in the power of vulnerability. Parallel to »Stierhunger«, Linke asks in »Sex und Kartoffeln« at the Theater Magdeburg how sexualities can be decolonized.
Content Note: Addressing eating disorders* and sexualized violence
In the piece, Anna Kirstine Linke uses the terms “eating disorders” and “sick” to take an intermediate step, as an ex-sufferer of bulimia and other eating disorders, in the self-appropriation of these foreign terms, towards softening the binary of “healthy” and “sick” in the long term.
With thanks to Kathrin Bach, Michel Blaser, Franca Stengl and all the (ex-) bulimics I met through »Stierhunger«.
A production by Anna Kirstine Linke in cooperation with Ballhaus Ost. Supported by the Entry Grant of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe, the #TakeHeart program of the Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of NEUSTART Kultur. Preliminary research funded by the Goethe Institute and the #TakeHeart program of the Performing Arts Fund with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of NEUSTART Kultur.
Ballhaus Ost Mediencooperation: taz
