Georgette Dee: Between singing and saying

Georgette Dee has invited me to her house in Berlin-Gatow. I stand in awe in front of the corner plot. I am early, walk along the hedge and admire the variety of plants and flowers that surround the house. Like an enchanted place, the garden gate with the words "Peace be with you" invites me to enter. "A mantra against anger," she will tell me later with a laugh.

I knock on the front door and there she is in front of me. The one I saw on stage at the Schiller Theater in Berlin in 1992 and haven't been able to get out of my heart since. Despite her linen shirt and baggy trousers, Georgette Dee has the aura of a queen. She asks me if I would like some coffee. I nod and look around. We are standing in the kitchen, which doubles as a living room. There are two armchairs by the window, facing the garden, where we sit down, both with a steaming cup in our hands. It's been raining in Berlin, it's damp and chilly. It gets to her bones, she says and sits down differently. A lot has changed since a year ago. I sit and listen, I have forgotten all the questions on my note, she has completely captivated me, without a stage or spotlight.

Life is already a theater, she begins. When will the curtain fall, I ask. I recite this sentence from one of her shows. She looks at me, understands and says seriously: "Yes, that's been my theme for a year." After a heart attack last July, things actually went smoothly again, but she notes that she has been incredibly angry ever since, she doesn't know why. It's terrible that she hasn't cared about anything since the operation. When she hears the news, she thinks they're out of their minds. But the impulse to rebel against it, to want to change something, is gone. "We humans don't seem to learn anything," she concludes. She means everything. Wars, hatred, inhumanity, greed for power. But she also reflects. "I include myself in that seamlessly, I stopped smoking when I was on the operating table and had a bypass."

A new show is planned for the fall; she is currently working on and with texts by Walt Whitman. His main work, the collection of poems "Leaves of Grass", which he repeatedly expanded and changed from 1855 until shortly before his death in 1892, impresses Georgette Dee and she finds potential for the stage in the verses.

"The stage - the magical place"

Georgette has been increasingly struggling with her ability to pick up on moods recently. She can assess people, she knows about their problems and senses vibrations. This has recently become too much for her, especially now that so many people are in a bad way. Then she withdraws. Needs distance. What is it like with her audience? That's something completely different. She feels at home on stage, it's a magical place, she says. "Something happens to me there," is how she puts it. She is aware of the people in the audience, but she herself spreads the atmosphere with her program and so the personal vibrations of the people do not reach her, but the resonance of her show wafts through the room. This is magical and gives her endless strength. Even when she had her first heart attack, but didn't know it yet because she only felt this diffuse pain in her chest area and just carried on, out of habit and well, because until then only others had ever had things like heart problems or strokes. You think you're immune until it happens, she reflects. So, despite chest pains and dizzy tiredness, Georgette played for another two weeks. Unbelievable. Then she called the doctor, who immediately referred her to hospital. She sat at the table in her kitchen in Gatow, smoked one last cigarette and left.

She misses smoking, somehow it was part of it, even on stage she used the cigarette as a means of expression. Just like wine. She has to laugh as she thinks back for a moment. "You can't imagine," she says, "how many shows I drove to the wall because I had one." She must have lost a lot of audiences, people who simply never came to a show again. Yes, she muses, things have changed. Wine is also history. A glass now and then, but ... well, that's just the way it is. She says, tossing back her white hair. What the heck, life goes on. She's a pensioner now, she jokes, which feels surreal.

Georgette Dee crosses her legs. I look at her and am impressed by this diva. Even here, in the kitchen, in her gardening look, she radiates a dignity that is in no way inferior to that of a queen. There's no pretense, no coquetry, just humanity. We are silent. It is a beautiful silence. She takes a sip of coffee and looks at me.

This is stagecraft

I am overwhelmed by memories. In 1992, I was 22 years old and studying dance, singing and acting at the Berlin University of the Arts. Our drama teacher gets us tickets for the Schiller Theater, he says we should see what stagecraft is. We could learn a lot there. Who is performing that evening? Georgette Dee, of course. The hall goes dark and here she comes. An elemental force, curls, a cigarette between her teeth, a glass of wine nearby. She throws her hair back as a matter of course and throws us off course. We laugh, we cry, we shake our heads in bewilderment, it's a party. Frenetic applause after every song, the air is on fire, the energy is electrifying. The curtain falls, the show is over, the crowd doesn't want to leave, wants more, there are encores, they remove their make-up on stage, smoke a cigarette and finally release us into the Berlin night air.

All this goes through my mind and I am overcome with great affection, I would like to get up and hug this great artist, but I don't dare.

Instead, I ask whether she sees her career as an act of social activism. Whether it was her way of showing that everyone loves, suffers and laughs, regardless of their lifestyle, gender, skin color and sexual orientation. After all, I say, she went her own way with a defiant naturalness when being LGBTQI+ was by no means mainstream. She laughs out loud, grinning that at some point every letter in the alphabet will be added and there will always be someone who doesn't feel addressed. No, no, she can't do anything with that and doesn't want to be a role model. She has simply always gone her own way, despite all the resistance. She never questioned herself, she just lived. She always wanted to be on stage and sing. Her family didn't support her, she moved from Bergen, where she grew up, to London, then to Berlin. Georgette always found people who supported her, who encouraged her, the rest ... was life. So simple. And yet so complex. Social activism? No, she leaves that to others. Like the climate campaigners, for whom she feels empathy and whose radicalism she can relate to.

Georgette Dee listens to the radio, which is one of her sources of inspiration. She never watches television. She can't stand it, all the faces, the noise, all the stupidity. She also used to watch television, she says. But she couldn't get used to the banality of the camera. There was no audience, the magic was completely missing, so she abandoned the idea of "Georgette goes TV". Other artists would have gilded their shows on television. That never interested her.

Time for the camera

The photographer rings the doorbell, it's time to return to reality. We go into the garden, the sun is coming through, the garden is steaming with moisture, which is now being displaced by the sun. She has asked for this photographer, they have known each other for a long time. As soon as the camera is pointed at Georgette Dee, it's as if the spotlights have gone on. The eyes flash, the body builds up a different tension, the facial expressions are greater. While the shutter clicks again and again, she talks about writing with sweeping arm movements. She prefers to invent her texts and stage shows away from home. The distance has always helped her to create dramaturgical arcs. Places like Marrakech are magical, she says, where she sat on the roof terrace of a café for a week and turned the head of the crunchy waiter. Out of sheer desperation at the sexually charged atmosphere, he repeatedly sank onto his prayer mat, much to Georgette's delight. She laughs. And the photographer pulls the trigger. I want to know which living artist impresses her. She immediately thinks of Peter Fox. He can create great images with his song lyrics, he describes the city where they both live and where I come from perfectly in the song "Schwarz zu blau", but songs like "Toskana Fan Boy" are also simply great.

Because I ask her to, Georgette Dee changes again. Out of her house suit and into her stage outfit. She affectionately calls it "my official robe". Without further ado, she sits down in the pool, the black velvet of the dress wet on the water. Just like a diva. She smells one of the flowers and briefly forgets that the spotlights are on. Click, the picture is in the can. After a few more poses, the audience is over. I say goodbye to this oasis, read "Peace be with you", close the garden gate and Gatow has me again.

Moments in Georgette Dee's life:

1958: Georgette Dee was born in Lüneburg Heath as the fifth child of a family from Pomerania on the Baltic Sea.

1979: After three years of training as a nurse, a pianist friend encouraged him: "You have to sing."

1980: Georgette Dee moves to Berlin. She gives her first concerts in classic gay venues. She feels at home in Berlin.

1992: A star is born: Georgette Dee gives her most legendary concert to date at the sold-out Schillertheater in Berlin. From then on, she gave countless concerts and released a CD almost every year.

2001: Georgette Dee and her longtime pianist Terry Truck decide to go their separate ways.

2009: Georgette Dee and Terry Truck are still working together today.