The Pinguin Bar — A Costume and Set Design Collaboration at Haus der Berliner Festspiele
Act 1: Black Jazz, post crises!
Re-enactement by Alibeta
@ Performing Exiles Festival at Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Berlin
As part of the Performing Exiles Festival at Haus der Berliner Festspiele, the Senegalese artist Alibeta - together with his Dakar based collective Kenu Lab together with Berlin based actors and musicians re-enacted the Pinguin Bar — a Black-run jazz bar that existed in Berlin-Schöneberg in 1949, a space for African artists, activists and musicians in post-war Berlin. It ran for two years before the authorities closed it in 1951.
I was invited to contribute the costume and set design, working in close collaboration with Dakar-based designer and sculptor Doulsy Jahgal. Together we transformed the bar space at Haus der Berliner Festspiele and created the costumes for the performers and stage musicians. Ten nights of performances, jazz, film screenings and conversation.
We use the shop´s garden as atelier to prepare the setdesign
https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/programm/2023/performing-exiles-start/spielplan-performing-exiles/the-pinguin-bar--african-resilience-and-presence
From the program:
After more than 70 years, the Senegalese artist Alibeta re-enacts the “Pinguin Bar”, which was the place for jazz, resistance and activism of the Black community in Berlin around 1949.
In 1949, the “Pinguin Bar” opened its doors at Bülowstraße 6 in Berlin-Schöneberg. Conceptualised and run exclusively by people from African countries, it plays a conflicted role in the city’s history of Black lives. On the one hand, it was a meeting point by and for African artists and activists, for jazz and performance as well as a meeting point for performative Arts, resistance and memories for the Black community who had survived the war and the Shoah. On the other hand, the Pinguin Bar, an idea from Kala Kinger from Cameroon, was financed and advertised by a white married couple called Gruß and Hans von Hellfeld. It was also a space where racist continuities and exoticising fantasies of the white mainstream society could be upheld and which was based on the de-humanising colonial heritage of the Africa-shows and “Völkerschauen”, folkloristic ethnological displays. In 1951 the authorities closed the very successful bar, pretexting tax reasons.
For “Performing Exiles”, the Senegalese curator and multidisciplinary artist, Alibeta, will re-enact the “Pinguin Bar” with a programme featuring concerts, film screenings and performances to open a bigger conversation and to address the issue of African traces and presence in Germany today. This first act of an upcoming series is connecting the origin of the bar to the current situation of the Black community in Berlin – as a story of jazz, as a music of traces and healing of the African community.
