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THEATRE

‘My routines are sexual, it works in Germany’

US comedian Margaret Cho is heading for Germany as part of her latest tour. She told The Local why she is looking forward to trying out her rather rude routines on a German audience.

'My routines are sexual, it works in Germany'
US comedian Margaret Cho is looking forward to performing in front of less puritanical audiences. Photo: Austin Young

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With shows in eight countries across Europe lined up, Cho will be gracing stages in Cologne, Munich and, most excitingly for her, Berlin. “This will be my first show there,” she said.

As a city with an open attitude towards sexuality, the Mother tour could strike a real chord with the Berlin crowd – billed as “an untraditional look at motherhood and how we see maternal figures and strong women in queer culture.”

Indeed Germany as a whole will be an exciting place to perform for award-winner Cho. “My routines are very sexually frank and I think this will work well with German audiences as there's less of a puritanical streak there,” she said.

 

An English-language comedian, Cho said that previous visits to Germany on other tours had allayed any fears about the linguistic barrier. “I found that every German person I met spoke English and this was very exciting,” she said.

The San Francisco native explained that these first steps “changed the way I thought about performing in Europe".

“Comedy is starting to travel very well and I learned this from Germany,” she said, adding that she tended to keep an ear out for different ways to personalise shows to where she was performing.

Mother, which toured the US earlier this year, is her edgiest show to date, she says, touching on race issues, drugs, and sexuality.

 

Click here for tour dates and tickets for December

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PARIS

Top Paris theatre reopens as Covid occupy movement ends

French actors, stage technicians and other members of the performing arts ended a more-than-two-month occupation of the famous Odéon theatre in Paris on Sunday, allowing the show to go on after this week's easing of Covid-19 curbs.

Top Paris theatre reopens as Covid occupy movement ends
A picture taken on January 26, 2011 in Paris shows the facade of the Odéon theatre. LOIC VENANCE / AFP

The protesters took down the banners they had slung across the facade of the venue in the Left Bank as they left at dawn, leaving just one inscribed “See you soon”.

“We’re reopening!,” theatre director Stéphane Braunschweig exclaimed on the venue’s website, adding that it was “a relief and a great joy to be able to finally celebrate the reunion of the artists with the public.”

The Odéon, one of France’s six national theatres, was one of around 100 venues that were occupied in recent weeks by people working in arts and entertainment.

The protesters are demanding that the government extend a special Covid relief programme for “intermittents” — performers, musicians, technicians and other people who live from contract to contract in arts and entertainment.

READ ALSO: Protesters occupy French theatres to demand an end to closure of cultural spaces

With theatres shut since October due to the pandemic, the occupations had gone largely unnoticed by the general public until this week when cultural venues were finally cleared to reopen.

The Odéon, which was inaugurated by Marie-Antoinette in 1782, had planned to mark the reopening in style, by staging Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece “The Glass Menagerie”, with cinema star Isabelle Huppert as a former southern belle mourning the comforts of her youth.

But the protests scuppered the first five performances, with management saying the venue was blocked — a claim the protesters denied.

“What we wanted was for it (the performance) to go ahead, along with an occupation allowing us to speak out and hang our banners. We don’t want to stop the show,” Denis Gravouil, head of the performing arts chapter of the militant CGT union, said on Sunday.

Two other major theatres — the Colline theatre in eastern Paris and the National Theatre of Strasbourg — have also been affected by the protests.
 
France has one of the world’s most generous support systems for self-employed people in the arts and media, providing unemployment benefit to those who can prove they have worked at least 507 hours over the past 12 months.

But with venues closed for nearly seven months, and strict capacity limits imposed on those that reopened this week, the “intermittents” complained they could not make up their hours.

The government had already extended a year-long deadline for them to return to work by four months.

The “intermittents” are pushing for a year-long extension instead.

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