hässliches tennis
​Theaterstück von Johannes Hoffmann

• mit "hässliches tennis" nehme ich an dem europäischen Projekt "Future Narratives for Planet Earth" teil.

Kim and Mika are best friends and spend most of their time together on the tennis court, perfecting their tennis skills and improving their aesthetic tennis game.

Everything else is subordinated to the trendy sport of tennis, to the aesthetics of tennis, to amusement and, in particular, to fashionable chic.Creamy white is definitely the colour and terrycloth the fabric of the season!

 

So life on the tennis court is aesthetically pleasing, disciplined, well organized, morally upright, classy, fancy and smart. The daily training routine on aesthetic tennis also includes practising a good character and cultivating an elegant, winning appearance. Who has the best performance, the best asthetic skills, the best selfimprovement – who has what it takes to be a star.

 

But just as the latest tennis-fashion-trends spread from tennis-court to tennis-court, rumours are also doing their rounds in this tennis-bubble. Rumours of bad weather, straying pets, somtimes even from fleeing people.

But these are news from the edges, rumours from the outer tennis courts, rumours that only seep into Mika and Kim's world from time to time. Everyday life on the tennis-court still seems stable.

 

But something has spread unnoticed in the smart world of the tennis court and is now becoming increasingly invasive and highly visible: It starts with annoying swarms of mosquitoes buzzing in the floodlight, then strange insects enter the court and crawl across the pitch, and above all, an invasive mushroom mycelium is growing and spreading under the artificial turf and Mika suddenly develops a rash, an allergic reaction on the skin, initially only in a small area, then all over his body.

 

It itches and Mika scratches, scratches and can't stop scratching. As if Mika is scratching Mika out of Mika. Or as if Mika is scratching out a new Mika.

 

Mika starts writing a diary and paranoidly notes all the changes. Mika sees signs everywhere, even in the clouds of the sky. Mika is writing and scratching, writing and scratching, writing and scratching, writing and scratching. It looks as if Mika is being drawn into something, as if the proliferating, invasive mushroom mycelium is whispering to Mika, is luring Mika.

 

One day Mika discovers a hole in the artificial turf from which it is moulding, growing, spreading and rotting – apparently the starting point of this invasion and at the same time the entrance to a subterranean passageway.

 

Mika decides to explore this uncanny world beneath the tennis court – now everything changes, Mika leaves everything behind.

Mika destroys the bank card and burns the personal belongings effectful on the tennis court and leaves the court in an aesthetic camouflage tennis outfit.

 

A journey into the unknown begins, first along the sewage pipes, along the increasingly proliferating mushrooms on the walls, through an extensive underground tunnel system until Mika reaches a wasteland outside this tennis world, where a strange community of outsiders lives.

 

It's a toxic, unfriendly, bled-out, destroyed landscape, a fragile ecosystem,  in which activists, dropouts, preppers, shamans, war veterans, refugees live. But also non-human protagonsits learned to survive there – microorganisms live on plastic waste, radioactive waste is food for bacterial slime and above all, a monstrous mushroom mycelium grows together with rotting data cables in the sediments of the earth. An organic-technical tissue, web, mesh, new network – a kind of collective memory of this place which remembers and at the same time also an oracle that envisions.

This pulsating subterranean oragnic-technical tissue is the secret main protagonist of „hässliches tennis“.