“It’s showtime baby, get in the magic ball!”

See, it's not about races
Just places Faces
Where your blood comes from
Is where your space is
I've seen the bright get duller
I'm not gonna spend my life being a color

“... it doesn't matter if you're black or white” Michael Jackson sang in 1991.

Along with what was an innovative video for the time, that song wrote pop history. The faces of different individuals continuously morphed into each other. Women become men, redheads become black-haired, whites become Black, Asians become Latinx. The boundaries between identities become blurred, revealing a central promise of the 1990s: the overcoming of racial barriers.

Around the same time, there was a format called "Mini Playback Show" running on German television with top ratings. Children would imitate their favorite stars. They dressed up, danced, and performed like their adult role models—at times with extremely bizarre results.

The production PLAYBLACK draws on this show format and puts the promises of pop music to the test. Joana Tischkau has conceived a musical-performative collage about the roles of Black entertainers in a white-dominated entertainment industry.

What ensues is an increasingly turbulent battle with the costumes, wigs, and dance steps, as the performers imitate various figures from pop history. In the process, they expose the white desire for Black embodiment and highlight the otherwise invisible normalization of supposedly neutral white bodies. Through the multi-layered play of repetition, imitation, and exaggeration, it generates a critical lens that focuses on the winners in the firmament of stars and starlets.

"Joana Tischkau collects the splinters of a broken mirror from the repetitive loops of pop music and mass culture. Tischkau’s work shows how ‘sharp-edged’ this seemingly harmless material is and how hybridization, appropriation, and exclusion go hand in hand. At the same time, however—and this is the prerogative of comedy—it offers hope that a social whole can be found in this glittering heap.” (1)

PLAYBLACK RADIO was created as supplementary material for the staging of PLAYBLACK. In the radio play, the German voices of Black Hollywood stars collide with white music, pseudo-science, and the PC police. PLAYBLACK RADIO was voted Radio Play of the Year 2023.

CONCEPT & CHOREOGRAPHY Clara Reiner, Joana Tischkau SOUND DESIGN Jan Gehmlich PERFORMANCE Dori Antrie, Clara Reiner, Joana Tischkau DRAMATURGY & CO-DIRECTION Ellias Hampe COSTUME Ina Trenk, Nadine Bakota LIGHT Dennis Dieter Kopp ADDITIONAL GRAPHIC DESIGN Justus Gelberg ARTISTIC PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT Lisa Gehring PHOTOS Daniel Michael Shaw, Robin Junicke