Who Else Is Dead?

When Marie-Theres Schwinn is not standing on a theatre stage or in front of a film camera, she likes to slip into the role of a poetry slammer. And she does so with such success that she belongs to the select circle of those whom the audience repeatedly votes slammer of the evening. "The wonderful thing is that the text does not exist yet, unlike at an audition for a theatre role, for example. I have to write it myself. The work is thus very creative and I am entirely on my own. That is a great challenge." At the moment she is specialising in the poetry-slam concept "Dead or Alive". This brings about the ultimate contest: living performance poets of the here and now challenge deceased greats of poetry, who are brought to life by actors. Once an invitation for an evening lands on the table, the question arises for Marie-Theres Schwinn of who else is dead, since she wants to find an original poet. Then she gathers inspiration in libraries and bookshops and picks out passages from which she writes a monologue of her own. Such as the freely invented monologue of Wilhelm Rückert's wife, into which she worked quotations from her husband's poems. It was meant to be a text for the 150th anniversary of the poet's death. Playing a man as a woman, however, did not appeal to Marie-Theres Schwinn so much. So without further ado she created Rückert's wife. "I hadn't realised beforehand how much comedy the text contains. The audience laughed a lot," recounts the actress. In general, the way the audience goes along at a poetry slam, making clear through applause how the text is landing right now, is something Marie-Theres Schwinn enjoys. "When, after several poetry-slam evenings, I performed theatre again, I was amazed at how little applause there is. I had almost forgotten that," she laughs.