He is a superstar of pop culture. A superhero who has been defeating supervillains since 1939. Batman is a profoundly ambivalent character. Both as a comic hero and a film figure, he fights for good but is always too close to the dark side of power for comfort. The dialectical contradictions of our existence rage within him. “You’re not the same, Batman!” goes back to the superhero’s historical roots. When Gerhild Steinbuch and Jörg Albrecht – armed with microphones, synthesisers and bat detectors – undertake their text performance, they will tell his legend, his story, anew. Eloquently they explore the origins of this contradictory hero, presenting hitherto unknown predecessors and analysing sources of inspiration such as the silent film “The Bat Whispers” – with new and old film excerpts pointing the way for this concert-style setting. While this half-man, half-animal was still a criminal in this movie, the Batman exegete duo are now set to reverse the situation, thus eliminating any final certainties in the superhero’s world.
The text concert is the third collaboration of Austrian playwright Gerhild Steinbuch and German author and artist Jörg Albrecht. Recently focusing on the fan cults of the animated TV series “My Little Pony” in “Friendship Is” (steirischer herbst 2012) and on the poet Jean Paul in “Das reibende Gedränge der Welt”, they now explore the question of what Batman and the construction of his identity can tell us about the current state of society and the dynamic context of the human being, animal, and technology. What conceptions of good and evil, law and justice does he reflect?