The body, class and gender are the main focus of the second day of the MEDUSA Festival Berlin with the play SEXUS by Italian playwright Alessandro Paschitto and the award-winning debut aufstiegskörper. ein fühlversuch by German author Lena Riemer.
aufstiegskörper. ein fühlversuch by Lena Riemer
Society promises upward social mobility through education – but the ‘educational funnel’ remains a persistent problem. Lena Riemer’s characters attempt to navigate between their social background and their new educational and working environments. They decipher unfamiliar social codes and train their speech, attitudes, bodies and minds. In a dense stream of spoken and thought language, the text makes tangible how the pressure of climbing the social ladder is inscribed in the body. A play about social mobility, burnout and the body as the site of conforming to expectations and resistance.
SESSO (SEXUS) by Alessandro Paschitto, translated by Carola Köhler
The title is the one word that never appears in the text, and yet that is precisely what the play is about. SEXUS is a sharp and ironic play about gender, identity and societal expectations. Here, language – which oscillates between reportage, variety show and brief sketches – becomes both the instrument of control and the space for theatrical resistance.
Read by Knut Berger, Theresa Berlage, Joao D’Orey, Via Jikeli
Directed by Tobias Herzberg
Followed by an audience discussion with the playwrights Alessandro Paschitto, Lena Riemer and the translator Carola Köhler.
More events at the MEDUSA Festival Berlin
Tobias Herzberg is a director and dramaturg. He studied Theatre Directing in Hamburg and Zurich and has been a member of the artistic direction team at the Schauspielhaus Wien since 2023. As a dramaturg, he has worked at the Wiener Burgtheater and the Maxim Gorki Theatre Berlin, where he was also the artistic director of Studio Я from 2017 to 2019. At the Schauspielhaus Wien, he most recently directed the German-language premiere of Eve Leigh’s Verbranntes Land (Salty Irina). He works closely with writers such as Nora Abdel-Maksoud, Sivan Ben Yishai, Max Czollek, Sasha Marianna Salzmann and Magdalena Schrefel. Herzberg teaches at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and is actively involved in pluralistic remembrance work as a member of the Coalition for Pluralistic Public Discourse (CPPD).
Carola Köhler has been a freelance editor since 2008, occasionally venturing into translation. She studied Modern German Literature, Italian and Art History, and spent six years as a research assistant at the Humboldt University in Berlin in the Department of Italian Linguistics. In 2017, she produced the comic book translation of Zerocalcare’s Kobane Calling and Manuele Fior’s Die Tage der Amsel (Blackbird Days), for which she was awarded the German-Italian Translation Prize’s Encouragement Award in 2020.
Alessandro Paschitto completed his studies in Directing at the Paolo Grassi School of Drama in Milan in 2021. As a playwright and director, he founded the theatre group Ctrl+Alt+Canc and has developed productions with the Teatro di Napoli – Teatro Nazionale and the Campania Teatro Festival. His plays have received many awards and been selected for various festivals, including the Premio Nuove Sensibilità 2.0 and the In-Box Generation Award. His work is featured in the publication Nuova Scena Italiana nel Mondo.
Lena Riemer has been studying dramaturgy at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts since 2026. She was a member of the jury for the German Children’s and Youth Theatre Prize and is part of the current jury for the Treffen junger Autor*innen. Her debut aufstiegskörper. ein fühlversuch was awarded the Nestroy Theatre Prize for “Best Newcomer” in 2025 and premiered at the Theater am Werk in Vienna, directed by Christine Eder. Her second play, unreif, was nominated for the Retzhofer Drama Prize in 2025.
MEDUSA is supported by the EU Creative Europe programme and implemented in partnership by Das Kombinat with Drama Panorama (DE), En Kai Pan (IT), Casa del Contemporaneo (IT), 36 Monkeys (BG), and Eurodram BG (BG). MEDUSA Festival Berlin is co-funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion and takes place in cooperation with Volksbühne. The event From Translation to Circulation: Three European Perspectives is a collaboration with the International Theatre Institute (ITI).