Liina Magnea: What’s a Mob to a King (Plot-twist Redemption) – Sophiensæle | Independent Theater in Berlin
Liina Magnea: What’s a Mob to a King (Plot-twist Redemption)
Berlin-based artist Liina Magnea blends performance, music, and choreography to create works exploring identity and psychological fragility in the digital age. In her performances, between experimental musical, sessions of doomscrolling, and intense character work, she subverts figures charged with violence, such as police officers, soldiers, or school shooters, by dismantling them through a mix of tragedy and absurdity.
In her new work, Magnea explores how precarity and economic foreclosure produce a perfect soldier, and how the state fills the gap that appears when profession or community fail to provide a stable identity. On stage the artist embodies both the myth-making male genius artist and the Diplomat’s Wife — an authoritarian power figure offering ideology as substitute attachment to the lonely, love-starved, and purposeless.
What’s a Mob to a King (Plot-twist Redemption) traces how ideology enters the body and how heroism unravels in times where war is turned into consumable content and the front into a TikTok Stage. In an era of new honesty, where injustices no longer need to be concealed, Liina Magnea asks what still seduces us. Because what seduces is always, in part, aesthetic. Even the villain. Perhaps especially him.
The information on accessibility is still in progress and will be updated as soon as possible. If any questions remain unanswered until then, please feel free to contact the communication department at barrierefreiheit@sophiensaele.com or 030 27 89 00 35. Please note that details may change by the day of the event. Therefore, if you find out after you have purchased your ticket that the performance is no longer accessible to you, you can contact us for a ticket return at ticketing@sophiensaele.com or 030 27 89 00 45 until 5 business days after the event (Monday through Friday between 10am and 6pm).
Duration
- Approx. 60 min. without intermission
Language
- German, English, and Finnish spoken language
- Heavily text-based
Lighting
- Dim lighting
- Strobe lights, sudden changes in lighting, and bright lights are used
- There are moments of complete darkness
- Sudden changes in lighting, strobe lights, bright lights, fog, and other effects occur
Other Effects
- Video projections are used
- Stage fog is used
Audience
- Seated grandstand
- 2 beanbag seats bookable according to availability
- 2 wheelchair spaces bookable according to availability
- During the show, the room can only be exited via the stage area for people who need to use the elevator or access the accessible restrooms
Early Boarding
Early boarding is possible. Meeting point is in the courtyard at the No-Working Space
Tickets
- Reservations can be made via the ticket telephone at 030 283 52 66, Monday to Friday from 4pm-6pm
- Via the online ticket shop
- At the box office
You can also find more information about accessibility at the house here.
Choreography, performance, text: Liina Magnea
Performance: Noah Rees, Konstantin Wloch
Composer, text: Hjörtur Hjörleifsson
Light, stage: Astrid K. Nylander
Costume: Anna Philippa Müller
Costume assistant: Anna Melnikova
A production by Liina Magnea in co-production with Sophiensæle. Supported by The Swedish Art Council and Icelandic Art Center. Never Work – International Performance Festival is a festival by Sophiensæle, supported by the Capital Cultural Fund (HKF). Sophiensæle is supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion. Media partners: Berlin Art Link, Missy Magazine, Siegessäule, taz.
Liina Magnea is a Berlin based artist working across performance, music, choreography and film. Her practice is driven by a fascination with the immaterial Gesamtkunstwerk, combining disciplines into fluid works that reflect the fragmented logic of the digital age. Drawing on phenomena such as doomscrolling, she explores identity, psychological fragility, and compulsive behavior.
In her performances, Magnea inhabits charged figures such as police officers, soldiers or school shooters, which she dismantles through an interplay of tragedy and absurdity. Her work moves between theatricality and collapse, asking how constructed realities can function as coping mechanisms in times of instability.
Her work has been presented at Volksbühne Berlin, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, MUDAM Luxembourg, MDT Stockholm, Centrale di Fies and Steirischer Herbst among others.
