UGLY DUCKLING

About the show

"I never dreamed of such happiness as this while I was an ugly little duckling." Many of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales deal with the subject of transformation: the little mermaid turns into a human, the ugly duckling into a beautiful swan. The fact that these can also be regarded as a masked game of sexual and gender transformation is the starting point for a project that juxtaposes Andersen's fairy tales with the lives of Berlin drag queens. These doyens of urban nightlife turn this gender-bending game into a liberating spectacle. In doing so, they move between shameless self-expression and subcultural crusade. Their transformations using make-up and wigs produce not only a new persona but also new self-confidence. The character that emerges is the proud swan, in whose form the ugly duckling can confront the world.