FEMPOEM

Zwischen Brasilien, Eifel und Berlin: Stephan Hellweg im Gespräch





Schauspieler, Moderator und Sprecher Stephan Hellweg war zu Gast bei FEM POEM. Im Gespräch mit Romina Achatz ging es um seine autobiografische Lesereihe Zwischen Brasilien, Eifel und Berlin, um Literatur als Begleiterin durch unterschiedliche Lebensphasen und um die Frage, wie persönliche Erfahrungen in künstlerische Arbeit einfließen. Hellweg wurde in Brasilien geboren und wuchs nach seiner Adoption in der Eifel auf. Heute arbeitet er für Theater, Film und Fernsehen. Er war unter anderem im Kinofilm Führer und Verführer von Joachim A. Lang zu sehen, arbeitete mit international renommierten Künstlerinnen wie Meg Stuart und Deborah Hay und spielt in der fünften Staffel der ZDFneo-Comedyserie Doppelhaushälfte.


In Zwischen Brasilien, Eifel und Berlin verbindet Hellweg seine eigene Biografie mit Literatur. Texte von Christopher Isherwood, James Baldwin, Naja Marie Aidt und weiteren Autor:innen treffen auf Erinnerungen und Erfahrungen aus seinem eigenen Leben. Während der Sendung präsentiert er Ausschnitte aus der Lesereihe.Inspiriert von „Der Soundtrack meines Lebens“ suchte er nach der Literatur seines Lebens. Bücher werden zu Erinnerungsräumen, zu Wegmarken und manchmal auch zu einer Sprache für Erfahrungen, für die zunächst die eigenen Worte fehlen.


Ein weiterer Teil des Gesprächs widmet sich Long Covid und ME/CFS und damit der Erfahrung eines Körpers, dessen Möglichkeiten sich plötzlich verändern können. Auch hier stellt sich die Frage nach Sprache, Sichtbarkeit und danach, wie persönliche Krisen Eingang in künstlerische und biografische Erzählungen und Werke finden.


So entsteht ein Gespräch über Schauspiel und Literatur, über Herkunft und Erinnerung, über Krankheit, Freundschaft, Abschied und künstlerische Praxis – und darüber, welche Bücher uns zu bestimmten Zeitpunkten unseres Lebens finden und vielleicht länger bei uns bleiben, als wir zunächst ahnen.

Berger spent four years living in Japan, moving within communities of dancers, filmmakers, and musicians. What began as informal, narration-free filming — including weekly visits to Yoshito Ohno’s studio — slowly unfolded into a long-term cinematic attention to Butoh as it continues to exist today. Invisible People follows dancers who hover between visibility and invisibility, between appearing and disappearing and memory. Rather than explaining or historicizing, the film stays close to bodies, gestures, atmospheres — allowing presence to emerge, waver, recede, and return. It’s also a film about fathers- her own and the final „father figure“ Yoshito Ohno. It is attentive to what flickers at the edge of perception. In conversation, Achatz and Berger explore artistic collaborations, alliances,  the contemporary Butoh dance scene in Japan and how Butoh inhabits thresholds between life and death, presence and absence. An episode for listeners drawn to dance, Japan, experimental cinema.

In this radio essay, Romina Achatz explores the cultural, philosophical, and literary history of mermaids, undines, and sirens. Beginning with ancient and medieval myths, including the writings of Paracelsus, she traces how water-bound, feminine-coded figures were once understood as embodiments of nature, transformation, and the emergence of the soul. The essay then examines how, within European traditions, these figures gradually become tied to narratives of love, possession, and projection. Through literary works such as Undine geht by Ingeborg Bachmann, Achatz reflects on the loss of voice, autonomy, and subjectivity, showing how the transition from water to land marks a shift into silence, dependency, and objectification. At the same time, the radio essay opens a queer-feminist and poststructuralist perspective: returning to the water becomes an act of resistance and self-assertion. Underwater, identity dissolves into multiplicity, fluidity, and affect — a space beyond fixed roles and normative concepts of love. Drawing on thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Blanchot, and Franz Kafka, sirens are reimagined not as seductive figures, but as forces, events, and interruptions that destabilize language and meaning. The essay also connects these ideas to global mythologies, including Mami Wata and Oshun, where water beings appear as powerful, sovereign entities rather than passive objects. In dialogue with voices such as Anaïs Nin and Audre Lorde and bell hooks the essay situates these figures within broader questions of creativity, voice, and resistance. Finally, Achatz reflects on the ecological and political urgency of these myths today. In the context of climate crisis, displacement, and ongoing violence, the figure of the mermaid becomes an allegory for the fragile relationship between humans and nature — and a call to return to depth, to imagination, and to forms of life that resist domination. The radio essay unfolds as a poetic and analytical journey into the oceanic — an invitation to listen differently, to embrace uncertainty, and to rediscover the creative forces that lie beneath the surface.

In this episode, Romina Achatz speaks with writer Stephen Barber, author of Films Ghost: Tatsumi Hijikata and the Transmutation of 1960s Japan, about seminal and forgotten figures who shaped the Japanese avant-garde of the 1960s. The conversation focuses especially on filmmakers and the remarkable collaborations between Butoh dancers, photographers, writers, philosophers, and choreographers surrounding Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno.


Drawing on his personal encounters, Stephen Barber reflects on meeting many of these extraordinary artists while they were still alive. All of them have since passed away, making his memories a rare first-hand testimony to a generation that profoundly transformed postwar Japanese culture.


The episode explores figures including Akiko Motofuji, Hironobu Oikawa, Eikoh Hosoe, Donald Richie, Takahiko Iimura, and Nobuo Ikemiya, as well as key works such as Rose-Coloured Dance, Anma the Masseur, Hiroshi Nakamura’s Super 8 film Revolt of the Body, Donald Richie’s Sacrifice and War Games, and Eikoh Hosoe’s Navel and A-Bombs. The conversation also revisits the Osaka Expo film Birth, filmed on the volcanic landscape of Mount Io in Hokkaido.


The episode concludes with a conversation about the importance of archives in preserving the history of Butoh, as Stephen Barber asks Romina Achatz about her own experience visiting the extraordinary private archive and dance studio of the famous choreographer Nakao Ikemiya, the son of Nobuo Ikemiya, who worked with Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno during their recent research in Japan.