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“Identitti” comes to the theater

FFor goddesses, changing appearances is of course not a problem. Especially not for Kali, the multi-armed, blue-skinned woman, who in Mithu Sanyal’s novel “Identitti” also shows a downright joke. Now Kali has landed on the stage: already in November 2021, half a year after the publication of the novel, at the Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf and now, in a production by Salome Dastmalchi, at the Staatstheater Darmstadt.

Mithu Sanyal will be there for the premiere – of course. The cultural scientist and publicist from Düsseldorf, born in 1971, has already traveled a great deal and come a long way with her first novel. Shortlisted for the German Book Prize, Ernst Bloch Prize, Ruhr Literature Prize: The story about the student Nivedita, like Sanyal herself the daughter of a Polish mother and an Indian father, and her esteemed professor Saraswati has become a bestseller. The fact that Saraswati turns out to be white triggers the scandal in which Nivedita also has to position herself. It is a novel that the public likes, that is amusing to read and at the same time, strengthened by theory, deals with the current questions of identity politics and postcolonialism. That was a coup. Quite apart from the fact that with the goddess Kali, a fantastic element, with tweets and blog posts, our multimedia world plays a major role in the novel.

Theater has its own procedures

How does it all fit on stage? The theater, as Sanyal now knows, has its very own procedures. For the Düsseldorf premiere she had written a dramatic text for the first time. “I learned a lot – including what you can do wrong. It’s a very different medium. I also did radio plays before, but there are completely different possibilities in the theater. If there are tweets and blogs in the novel, it could be breaking the fourth wall on stage, for example. But adapting your own material is a challenge.”

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