REVIEWS,
TEXTS ABOUT MY WORK

TERE MERE BEECH MEIN, I DONT KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS

(Wortmeldungen Award for critical short texts)

“Juli Mahid Carly writes about the impossibility of an organic perspective from the Western diaspora on the "homeland" Bangladesh and one's own existence in between. In an aesthetically sophisticated sampling of orientalist clichés, pop-cultural references, and insightful observations, 'Tere Mere Beech Mein'—I have no idea what that means—reveals colonial dependencies and ambiguities within a transnational family network, sentence by sentence.” (Jury statement)

LINK

KABALE+LIEBE

“It is also a piece about how one could view Schiller today. Suddenly, a huge pearl necklace is unpacked that could have belonged to Schiller's mother and might be looted art, acquired from slaves during the colonial era. Schiller's life is excavated on stage because men of Schiller's status at that time were by no means disdainful of "conquests" with girls who could not refuse.

And there really was a Luise in his life as a "young love" who had to enter a convent in disgrace when her relationship with the poet was revealed. On the other side, the poet laid his fingers on the double standard of the society in which he lived. There's no question that in this play, the layers between the original and Juli Mahid Carly's adaptation change so swiftly that one could watch the play several times to gain a new perspective each time.”

(Oliver Fiedler, Singener Wochenblatt)

A SWEET ESCAPE

“Under the title "Hansel & Gretel: A Sweet Escape," escapism meets a variety of tangible problems: child poverty, eating disorders, diabetes, homo- and transphobia. Carly throws everything into a wild ride through the Grimm fairy-tale world. Because in addition to the usual suspects, there is also room for Rapunzel, the wolf (who will later reveal himself as Jacob Grimm in wolf's clothing), and Bernd das Brot.

The fact that this star of children's television is not from Grimm? Completely irrelevant. Here, things are wildly associated and connected that don't actually belong together. Carly is far from making pedagogical moralizing theater; this is about a genuinely painful kind of fun.”

(Anne Fritsch, Nachtkritik)

ANTI.AGING.APFEL

“The brilliant CEO Ilona Masc of Masc for Mascara and her assistant Shamini Shamhaar-Schmidtke save the planet with their latest invention for eternal rejuvenation, which turns out to be a microwave, or rather a time machine. The project convinces with iconic pop culture references and a lot of makeup. As confirmation, there is thunderous applause after the all-too-short 20 minutes. The spectacle was more than refined and dripped with gender-fluid fun. Solely because of this piece, I would seriously consider taking on the stolen future again.”

(Lara Kastler, Subtext AT)

FATA MORGANA

"All this is not real
One would never have thought that this funny song by the relentless EAV would one day be honored in the theater, and then also in a production by young people who were not even born when the song appeared. Now, however, the performance is called "Fata Morgana", just like the sounding madness of that time. From this alone one can gauge that the evening itself is so. Insane. And fast-paced, except for a few places where it stands still.
Julian Mahid Carly wrote and directed the text himself, the first time at the small Bühne 3 of Volkstheater München. There it is in exactly the right place, because one has to imagine "Fata Morgana" best as a flash of inspiration, elaborately but somehow implemented as if in the moment, which does not want to have anything general. And lets four people play, sing, rave unleashed.

Everything can be bought, everything can be foisted on people.

It's about influencers who move to Dubai or other places in the Gulf, earn a lot of money there, for which they pay very little tax, in return for which they have to keep quiet about all the abuses that prevail there. Once there, however, Stormy and Toni, two influencers who find themselves in adventurous thought loops, encounter a strange institution called precisely Fata Morgana, which is a kind of cloning lab for super-designed, influential manifestations on the Internet. Fata Morgana, that is. Not real.
Everything is snappy, colorful, funny. Luise Deborah Daberkow plays Stormy as an overwrought condensate of all kinds of influencers and their foibles; she is a theatrical force, unsparing and accurate. Ruth Bohsung, whose Toni is repeatedly tormented by intellectual impulses, does the same, Maral Keshavarz and Lorenz Hochhuth are plenty crazy, but also very friendly rulers in the human laboratory. Everything can be bought, everything can be foisted on people. At the end there is the immediate product: You. With that, you can finally advertise everything."

(Egbert Tholl, Süddeutsche Zeitung)

MERMAID CUT

"Julian Mahid Carly's Mermaid Cut picks up on the current social debate about
gender, body roles and body images and takes them to extremes in an intelligent
and entertaining way. His staging is eloquent and witty, surprisingly different and: very musical. (...) The male or female body, according to the conviction of the director Julian Mahid Carly, determines our existence, our everyday life. Carly's concern therefore: The complete deconstruction of body images."

(Cordelia Marsch, SWR)

"And yet everything was supposed to be so beautiful: The little mermaid
with her prince, and then she is lying on the floor of his fish restaurant, wrapped in plastic film on the floor and is stared at from all sides. A sweating, human-sized sushi roll, which suddenly no longer wants to fit into the image of the lovely princess. Ashamed by the disgusted looks, the prince finally buckles and, instead of helping her he courts someone else. Doesn't sound very fairy tale, does it?

Well, it's not supposed to. "Mermaid Cut," which premiered last Tuesday at the Nord
is based on Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Little Mermaid".
But Julian Mahid Carly's play skilfully takes the material apart, confronts it with itself and then embeds the components in a thought experiment: What if theLittle Mermaid was not the image of the femininity to be worshipped, but - God forbid - trans?

Gender inflates
The production combines its queer protagonist with an underwater
society of absolute tolerance. The kingdom of the sea king becomes
a world that abolishes the binary gender system, has made self-acceptance its motto, and has proclaimed the end of constricting role models. The result: people who, in their
utopia, hosting wild balls, recording TikToks, and constantly getting tangled up political discussions. The fact that the community simultaneously grows and suffers from this self-created discourse space is beautifully staged on stage: The
gender - manifested in the form of a huge, dark-green plastic film
- inflates during the scenes, sometimes enveloping the characters on stage,
makes them stumble again or offers them a hiding place.

Freed from the fin
All of this, in all its shrill exaggeratedness, often has something pleasantly irritating. "Mermaid Cut" provokes moments of getting out of sync,
in which the audience is jolted out of its comfortable everyday truths. What would really be, for example, if there were no more attributions from the outside? In some places this works works particularly well. For example, when the evil sea witch Ursula - here a dubious underwater beauty doctor - frees the mermaid from her fish fin and catapults her into the ideal of beauty of the land society, this is a perfect performance, both in terms of acting and scenery. Linguistically the play also benefits enormously from its self-deprecating pop culture references:
Disney's "Arielle the Mermaid" makes an appearance, as do Judith Butler and Netflix's "Queer Eye" series. All of this is realized on stage so quickly
and rhythmically that an energy is created that is easily sustained hour and a half. In this story, too, the little mermaid loses for the love of the
Prince, both her fin and her voice. Only a happy end the romance does not have. And how could it, when the fairy-tale wedding is the symbol
of everything that "Mermaid Cut" wants to question? Instead, the production succeeds in something else: the telling of a queer character who is to be taken seriously, queer character."

(Sabine Fischer, Stuttgarter Zeitung)

VERBINDUNGSFEHLER

"Julian Mahid Carly, the young author of Verbindungsfehler, is well versed in the latest chat fads - and in racist and sexist agitation. He writes in a youthful, casual, fast-paced language that illuminates the depths of real emotional distress. He's mastered the art of making seemingly flippant blather turn into genuine despair. To do so, he effortlessly commands a sea of metaphors and poetic imagery."

(Christine Adam, Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung)

"In the text, AYALI, TAO and KAYA know all the discourses, correct phrases and
hashtags of the time. Nothing remains unspoken between them. They flirt,
debate, and shamelessly and obsessively discuss everything, even if they do not get any closer to themselves. In between, again and again surreal (if it were not so so brutally real and present): A child with his mother drowning off the coast of southern Italy. You avoid here any naturalism and any kitsch by depicting the child not childlike, but almost poetically in a "high stage tone". Precisely in the style of a contemporary identitarian then again the hate language of the "patriot"
The play is as realistic and safe as it can be in a world between digital and analog.
Carly negotiates the great discourses of our time in the meta-level and makes amazing arcs down to Seehofer's belly button. The opulent first work is colloquial, then again lyrical, then elliptically internet-speak or awkwardly like an amateur moderator.
We hear the language of self-absorbed tutorials in the
backfire of users or that of intimate conversations and confessions."

(Oliver Bukowski, Author)

WEISSABGLEICH

"The film thrives on interesting actors and optical contrasts: while some colorful, whimsical interludes are shown in a kind of "colonialism peep show" in which Carly presents himself to his viewers in a soaring pose, the scenes in which he gets advice and changes are kept deliberately sober. The content of the film, the desire of skin bleaching becomes a personal concern that can affect the viewers emotionally. For this, Carly uses his different antagonists, his mother, as a good-natured but not understanding representation, the right-wing extremist identitarian as the evil worst and the plastic surgeon, as the capitalist who makes money with racism. The film constantly calls for identification and demarcation, and does so with a variety of forms and speed that seems thoroughly overwhelming, but also extremely funny and sensually plausible."

(Johannes Koch, Ludwigsburger Kreiszeitung)

JULI MAHID CARLY

ARBEITEN VITA PARTIZIPATION REVIEWS

ARBEITEN