KABARET KLUB: A Rehearsal for the End of the World
At Clärchens Ballhaus, the chandeliers are already glowing, the grand piano is being played, and people are moving through the room. I sit down with a drink and for a minute it feels less like arriving at a finished production and more like stumbling into a rehearsal, except the rehearsal is happening inside one of Berlin's most storied dance halls, and the people around you are dressed in their finest gowns, like escorts straight out of the 1920s. Which is very fitting.
The room has the strange quality of a backstage area that has accidentally become the stage. Nothing is quite in order, and somehow that is the correct order.
The piano solo is interrupted. Someone appears. Someone disappears. A song begins. A performer crosses the room. There are circus elements, soft songs, techno, BDSM, sensuality and that big dash of freakness that takes over the whole haus. The boundaries between what is performance and what is simply happening become increasingly difficult to locate.
Which, of course, is the point. You need to let go of control.
Mortis, the evening’s host and artistic director, carries a dark, decadent energy: all sparkle, presence and a voice that seems capable of filling whatever space is left behind. She moves between German songs, old and new, jokes and declarations, giving the whole thing the feeling of a musical that has escaped its own script.
At times, KABARET KLUB feels strangely reminiscent of The Greatest Showman. Not in its polished, cinematic spectacle, but in the sense that you are watching the machinery of a fantastical world reveal itself. Except here, the machinery is visibly human. The flaws are part of the beauty.
It is a house of weirdos, and everyone knows and celebrates their own- and others particulars. We are all freaks and we are all here for it. Together.
A mouse creature in a glittering muscle suit swings a whip and does filthy things. Later, someone hangs suspended in chains, performing acrobatics against deep techno while a voice from the side fills the space where a bassline might otherwise sit. A performer becomes a costume designer becomes a circus artist becomes part of the architecture.
There are no clean lines between disciplines. Performance bleeds into music, music into dance, dance into spectacle. It feels collaborative in the most literal sense: a reminder that there doesn't have to be a border between what one person is doing and what another person is allowed to imagine.
And the room itself participates.
Clärchens Ballhaus is more than a pretty backdrop. With its chandeliers, old dance-hall atmosphere and accumulated history, it already carries the feeling that time has not been entirely linear here.
Mortis puts it beautifully at one point:
“Where history is dripping from the walls in this place, the veil is the thinnest.”
The line between past and present gets thinner as the night goes on.
What begins with the intimacy of a rehearsal gradually becomes something much larger. The dance floor opens. Techno takes over. People start dancing. The lights intensify. The performances become more physical, more surreal, more difficult to process as individual acts. It is sensory overload without requiring the actual chemical assistance. If anything, the practical advice is to arrive sober. You might need all your faculties.
Then, suddenly, Mortis appears in a red poppy-flower dress.
“So what do we do now?” she asks. “Do we stay? Or do we leave?”
The question lands differently after everything that has happened.
Because underneath all the glitter, absurdity and decadence, KABARET KLUB keeps returning to something much more recognisable: pain, escape, survival, the strange things people build when reality becomes too much to sit with.
“What if we stay?”
Mortis jokes. The room laughs. She talks about escaping reality, escaping pain with a different pain. And then comes the line that somehow manages to sum up the entire evening without making it feel smaller:
“If life gives you pain, make champagne.”
It is ridiculous. It is sincere.
By this point, the show has become less about watching performers and more about being temporarily absorbed into their world: all the freaks, the misfits, the people who know exactly how to inhabit a room, and the people whose bodies were never quite welcomed to the table in the first place.
Mortis eventually brings it home with singing “Creep.”
And the room is singing with her.
It is a strong ending precisely because it isn't an ecstatic one.
KABARET KLUB doesn't pretend to solve anything. It offers something more modest and perhaps more useful: a few hours in which reality can be rearranged. A rehearsal instead of a finished product. A room where the flaws are visible and the weirdness is not something to hide.
Nothing is in order.
And that, somehow, is the order of things. Maybe, especially in Berlin.
Written by: Amanda Sandström
