Mika

Admission 18:30

In 2007, the whole of Europe instantly fell in love with the young man called Mika, who is as easy-going as he is curly, as soon as his debut single "Grace Kelly" was released. For a brief moment, his curious fusion of noble, even complex pop music with subtle humor, the grand gestures of a circus performance and a flair for calculated breaks could have been mistaken for a fluke. He countered this initial skepticism in the best possible way: with further grandiose successes. Five singles from his first two albums "Life in Cartoon Motion" and "The Boy Who Knew Too Much" alone reached the top 10 of the charts in his adopted country of England, among others; the albums themselves climbed into the top ten throughout Europe, including Germany, and formed the basis for more than 15 million albums sold to date.

And rightly so, because Michael Holbrook Penniman, alias Mika, is a passionate wanderer between opposing worlds. Born in Lebanon, he fled the civil war with his family as a baby to start a new life first in Paris and a few years later in London. Here, too, the lanky oddball with the long curls did not have it easy: dyslexia and a learning disability as well as his coming out as bisexual made him the laughing stock of the class at school. What always remained for him as a refuge, meditation and medicine was music; initially in the serious field of classical music and opera, from 2006 mainly as a self-determined, subtle and clever clown between pop, art and rousing performances.