Carmen's revenant
“We must never forget: our most important task is to live,” the philosopher Michel de Montaigne recognized 500 years ago. A study by the Rheingold Salon Institute recently came to the conclusion that Germans have forgotten exactly this. Almost everyone says that enjoyment is what makes life worth living - but almost half of people have the feeling that this is rarely achieved anymore. Those who have lost their enjoyment could take tutoring from Annette Meisl: The Cologne singer and author, who runs a cigar factory and a salon in Ehrenfeld, calls herself a “noble woman” (“La Galana” – that’s also the name of her cigar factory). . When she wrote a book seven years ago about her life with five lovers (“The Sexperiment”), some of those who were no longer able to enjoy themselves sat up and take notice. On Tuesday evening, Annette Meisl brought her life as a musical cabaret to the stage in the Friedrich-Ebert-Saal in Bickendorf: Accompanied by the multi-instrumentalist and producer Geo Schaller, she appears in "Carmen 5.0" as the alter ego of the most famous bon vivant in cultural history - a full woman , who takes the men she wants and is more surprised than made fun of those stressed out by monogamy. She involves the audience, but when asked about who is registered on dating platforms, who is dominant in bed or who likes sado-maso games, she cannot hope for too much interest in participating.
Meisl talks about the man who bit through ice cubes after sex and dedicates a song to her “Eskimo”, she is reminiscent of Lotte Reiniger, who made a silhouette film (paper cut) about Carmen in 1933, shows a film sequence in which Carmen puffs on a cigarette, before she seduces a man, and a little later, filmed live and thrown at a screen, she rolls a cigar herself - including a few raunchy gags.
The distribution of roles between Meisl and Schaller is ideal: she is the full woman, he is the slight, shy head type, without whose musical skills the stories would hardly be viable. Naturally, there is also the comedy that comes with living with five men
Tragedy: Although the author calls herself a “love expert” and can draw on a wealth of experience, she has not yet found lasting love. Or rather: She may not want to find it at all because it is more like her nature to look for love in many people. An attitude that quite a few scientists consider to be forward-looking. In the long term, classic monogamous marriage is likely to be phased out in modern civilizations.
Annette Meisl is at her strongest during her two-hour tour de force through her life, always when she sings: her voice is full, her breath is long, every note is right, she masters opera, ballads and seductive chants, her self-composed La Galana song , in which she ends up being accompanied on guitar alongside Schaller by the Gipsy musician Rudi Rumstajn, is a catchy tune. Red wine, rum and cigars, which the bon vivant serves after the premiere, would have been fine during the performance.
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