The Catholic Church of St. Korbinian is not necessarily within walking distance of the many museums, galleries and art spaces that had reopened their doors for the long night of the Munich museums after a year of pandemic-related pause.

Nevertheless, far more than a thousand people, mostly young people, went to Sendling on Saturday evening to experience “Shadowlight” - a combination of dance performance, a video mapping installation with audio effects and texts.

Daniel Deckers

in the political editorial department responsible for “The Present”.

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However, the performance did not promise sensual pleasure - on the contrary.

The dancers in the choreography by Pedro Dias and light artist Philipp Geist had set themselves the task of expressing the unspeakable suffering of children, who are often marked by sexual violence throughout their lives, in scenes, movements and images.

The suggestion to visualize sexual violence from the perspective of those affected came three years ago from Peter Beer, then Vicar General of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising.

Today the clergyman from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome devotes himself to the subject of child protection.

Through the encounter with countless people affected and the experience of never-ending resistance in the church to face this side of her truth, it has become his life theme.

Agnes Wich, on the other hand, was a child when a Catholic priest abused her. It took decades before she could find words for what was being done to her. She is the first and the only one to speak on the steps in front of the high altar. “Blooming Dreams” is the title of the poem in which the petite woman allows the world of the child she once was to arise. Only then do seven women and men from the free dance scene have the chancel, which is "entangled" with elastic ropes, for themselves and translate the violence and the experience of inner death, but also the liberation and the ability to be touched again, into gestures and movements .

Finally, Agnes Wich also talks about allowing oneself to be touched.

She wishes this ability for the viewers of the performance.

She didn't have to express in words that the black-clad “perpetrators” sat down in the pews in the midst of the audience after they had done their work.

Whoever wanted to see saw.