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SAINT FLESH is a unique hybrid format between a sports show, art talk and live tutorial. The focus is on the body as an interface between theater and sport - and its staging on stage from a queer perspective.



Every two months, Duygu Ağal and Ricarda Hillermann invite guests from the border areas of performance and sport to examine a sport together for its theatrical, performative and staging qualities.


But what does it mean to constantly discipline yourself through sport? After a cruciate ligament tear and metacarpal fracture, Duygu and Ricarda question their own "sports addiction":

  • What are they actually performing - and what are they compensating for?
  • How can the supposed gap between theater and sport be resolved?

Initial answers are provided by forms of sporting staging such as wrestling as a show sport, bodybuilding or artistic gymnastics. But the central stage remains the body itself:

Sport and theater determine its social role with their own rituals. What does gender checks at the Olympics have to do with type casting, doping with drugs, clothing rules with costume design, goal celebrations with applause?

The title of the series refers to a historical shift: While the body was considered sinful flesh in the Middle Ages, it was increasingly idealized with the Enlightenment - a development that culminated in the neoliberal age. The body has become a capital investment, a projection surface, a battlefield. SAINT FLESH asks about its social role, about alienation and emancipation - and whether an athletic body can simply be an end in itself.


About the hosts

Duygu Ağal is an author, former association league player and chronically injured. Ağal is convinced that if she were a cis man, she would not have to host this show at all - or do any paid work at all. After finally saying goodbye to ball sports, she is now boxing again so as not to forget how to write.


Ricarda Hillermann works as a dramaturgy assistant at the Volksbühne, but this is actually just how she finances her life as an amateur cyclist. If she knew better, she would have stopped the sport long ago.


(TALK IN GERMAN)

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Additional information
Dates
March 2025
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