River Roux’s theatrical history began with Lola Arias’ Happy Nights in 2023. Prior to appearing in the piece, Roux worked with the Berlin Strippers Collective – but Roux says it was collaborating with Arias that truly led her into the world of performance. Now, fresh off the success of her archival rich one-woman show, Juice, at the Volksbühne earlier this year, Roux is once more being directed by Arias, this time in Androgynous – Portrait of a Naked Dancer, a work she also co-conceptualised. The piece attempts to act not just as autobiography but also map out a larger history of nightlife performance. Androgynous seeks to build queer community by connecting the life and myth of Anita Berber, the scandalous dancer of Berlin’s golden 20s, to the contemporary struggle of the city’s non-binary performers.
What are the origins of your idea to bring Berber to the stage?
I encountered her for the first time in a book about sex work and entertainment. I was really intrigued because that book framed her as doing sex work as we know it today. She did a lot of sex work-adjacent performance, but no one really knows if she actually sold sex, of if she sold the story of her selling sex – both may be true. Lola and I were like, ‘Okay, let’s do a kind of entwinement of my biography and her biography.’ This is what we’re doing now.
How did you and Arias come to collaborate on this particular piece?
Lola and I began working together on a piece about sex work in in 2023. There were some topics, like the historical connection of sex work and performance, that we wanted to explore further. I had been doing research on Anita Berber for a project on the history of sex work in Schöneberg; I told Lola about her and we got to work. It’s a very fruitful collaboration between a director and a performer both working with documentary materials and history.
She embodied a kind of resistance that I’m interested in, especially as we fascism rising in Germany once again.
How does it feel to take on Berber’s legacy?
We’re not trying to do a factual biography – it’s not possible, because the facts are so mingled, so interpreted. She’s already a myth. She’s no longer human, you could say. So we’re also confronting this idea of the mythologising of a human and making a biography, a spectacle, which is what happened to her in hindsight and what happens to many trans performance artists.
Why revive Berber right now?
I think that she embodied a kind of resistance that I’m interested in, especially as we see fascism rising in Germany once again. We wouldn’t do her justice calling her a particularly political person. I don’t think she was. But I think through the work she did on stage, she did embody a resistance – a refusal to follow a path of respectability, which is one of the ways we resist fascism today.
As opposed to Juice, where it was a one-woman show, you’re working with Bishop Black and Dieter Rita Scholl for this project. What have they been bringing to it?
What we’re trying to embody is a collective of queer community that exists in a politically very challenging time. And we have such different experiences and such different biographies – Bishop having worked in porn and in performance art for many years as a Black, gender non-conforming person. And Scholl has been working for 50 years – I’m always really amazed at the wealth of experience they have – and navigating a non-binary identity in TV and performance art since the 70s, which is an incredibly valuable experience to have onstage.
Androgynous. Portrait of a Naked Dancer is showing at the Maxim Gorki Theater on Nov 6, Nov 11 and Dec 7, tickets
