FAst before a band and whole worlds open. For Jen Byrne, the creator of the legendary Weimar Cabaret Singer Bernie Dieter, he came at the end of his own baptism video: filmed in Germany where it was initially high. Quickly advancing the usual scenes – moments of the church, of the family celebrating later, drinking champagne and eating cake – she suddenly encountered the remains of German prison porn, around 1970. “Many men with mustaches and all these very large bushes,” said Byrne, laughing.
The discovery echoes an experience she lived in eight years who looked at the Rocky Horror Picture Show with her parents, who “would stop it just before the orgy scene in the pool – One night I was alone and I kept looking. I said to myself:” Oh my god, there is a whole new end! “”
In one way or another, these sudden movements in adult spaces, from pious naivety to an unmountained raunch, have remained with it and perhaps partly explain the deliciously feverish sexuality of its alter ego of cabaret. After being interviewed in the character that Bernie Dieter, Byrne finally abandons the singer's mask and discusses with the Guardian for the first time as herself. “It's a bit frightening but in an exciting way,” she said on a coffee while she is preparing to open her new show, Cabaret club, in Melbourne.
Dieter is an international element on the Cabaret stage, after welcoming the puffon stores of Cirque Ribald de la Clique for several years, as well as to visit its own shows Little Death Club and Berlin Underground across Europe and the United Kingdom. In his wig Louise Brooks, Dieter deliberately evokes the exhilarating maximalism of Weimar Cabaret, with his lively edges and his politically subversive sensitivity. If Byrne is not entirely as scandalous as Dieter – who often climbs on public members in her predilection for shaggy men – she always suggests levels of attraction and depravity under her gamine smile.
“Bernie is obviously an extension of me,” says Byrne. “Everything she represents is actually in me.” But Dieter also allows a kind of debauched anarchy with which Byrne would never get away with it in ordinary life – “all these beautiful primitive, dark, sexy and strange things that live deeply in you that you are not always allowed to express”.
Byrne has played as a Dieter since the twenties, but has only recently discovered a family bond with the character who dates back to the childhood of his German grandmother. As she slipped into dementia, her Oma began to relive her first life by growing up in a traveling circus while Germany in wartime divided in two. In a kind of reversal of these video bands, Oma was stuck in permanent rewind and a fascinating story emerged.
“She was born in Dresden in 1932, and the family traveled under the umbrella of Sarrasani, one of the great circuses at the time. But the border lasts between the East and the West has made it more and more difficult to visit, ”explains Byrne.
The stepfather of his Oma, Harry – a violent and violent man who had forbidden his daughter -in -law to play – decided that they had to escape on the other side of the border to the west.
Oma was introduced as a smuggling under a pile of costumes while his brothers hid in the hay of the elephant enclosures. Once on the other side, Harry abandoned his family and left them with a single catering truck.
“In one way or another, they managed to survive,” explains Byrne. “Whenever they got money by selling sausages, they added to a room and the catering truck became their kitchen.” This Méli-Mélo approach to architecture made “a strange house, with rooms falling in random places. It was very weird ”.
Oma never realized his dream of playing adulthood, so his family never established the link between her and the alter ego of inspired inspired by Weimar de Byrne. “All these stories and no one had told me,” says Byrne. “I don't know why; They never talked about it. “
Dieter may have been not invited to Byrne's conscience, but it clearly satisfied a need. It is something by Byrne recognizes when it turns into the world, especially during the visit of countries with less permissive attitudes towards sex and sexuality. Dieter's programs, provocative to the best of cases, take a social and political emergency in a place like Hungary, where LGBTQ + rights are erased, and even Japan, which is “still quite traditional in their gender roles”.
Some of the reactions she receives from the public after her shows surprise her, for their fervor and joy. “An impeccably dressed Japanese woman in the 70s took my hands and said to me:” Thank you for the most joy I had in my life “.” Another woman in the United Kingdom told Byrne that she was going to leave her husband after seeing the show. “She returned a year later and said,” I left her. I have the best time in my life. I'm with a woman now. »»
Duality and mirror, transfiguration and self-activation, have always sat down at the heart of Byrne's comical creation, but as it matures “the veil between Bernie and me becomes thinner and the differences become less”.
While right -wing nationalism and ultra -conservative attitudes towards sex and sex reappear, the permitivity soaked in Weimar's Gin also begins to feel like a radical response at the moments in which we live – almost 100 years after his first German in Germany.
“Weimar Cabaret has a kind of punk, dirty, granular, raw and social energy on this subject,” explains Byrne. “It vanished at the time when there is a lot of frightening shit in the world.”
