On Sunday, May 3, 2026, at 7 p.m., the duo DOTA will perform at the Idar-Oberstein Municipal Theater. Accompanied by guitarist Jan Rohrbach, Dota Kehr will sing songs to poems by Mascha Kaléko, among others. The concert is the prelude to this year's THEATERSOMMER Idar-Oberstein, which will continue on June 16, 2026 at Schloss Oberstein with the play "Mac Beth" by the American Drama Group.
Dota Kehr is from Berlin, writes lyrics, sings and has been making music with her band DOTA since 2003. In the meantime, they have recorded 16 albums and played countless tours at home and abroad. Dota hits the nerve of the times with music that jumps and dances, pauses, jumps off the quarry pond jetty, swims and dives. She mixes folk and indietronica and lets her love of Brazilian music shine through here and there. Her lyrics are touching in their immediacy; Dota does not speak of the ivory tower, but of the people here and now.
At a concert, a fan slips her a booklet, author: Mascha Kaléko. Kaléko began writing in Berlin in the 1920s, from 1929 she published in daily newspapers, the early poems are trenchant everyday sketches in Berlin dialect. She made a name for herself, socializing with the greats of Berlin bohemia in the Romanisches Café. Her first book "Das lyrische Stenogrammheft" was published in 1933 and was immediately well received. Her success as a writer came to an abrupt end when the Nazis came to power; as a Jew, she was no longer allowed to publish. She left Berlin in 1938, but the city remained a firm point of reference for her.
Dota is enthusiastic about the directness of the poems, the brevity of the language and decides to make music from the texts. It is fortunate that she took up Kaléko's poems and turned them into songs. Like Dota, Kaléko's lyrics are not about myths and distant spheres, but about people. So it is not at all surprising that Dota finds it so easy to lend her voice to these related texts. Dota and her band have given the poems an additional layer, new colors, sometimes set in contrast to the text, and have achieved the feat that, while listening to the songs, you never once think of poetry with musical accompaniment. Dota has rescued Mascha Kaléko's texts for our time, and even more: they sound as if they were written now, in this form.
In the meantime, two albums with texts by Mascha Koléko have been produced. In 2026, Dota will once again play a few selected concerts with this program. At the concert in Idar-Oberstein in duo formation with Jan Rohrbach. There will be songs from the two Kaléko albums and some pieces with her own lyrics: Acoustic, concertante, rousing. The Koléko program "In der fernsten der Fernen" will be awarded the German Ruth World Music Prize this year. With this award, the Rudolstadt Festival honors outstanding achievements in the genres of world, roots, folk and song. The award will be presented during the festival, which takes place from July 2 to 5, 2026.
- Tickets are available in advance at www.ticket-regional.de and at the associated advance booking offices. The THEATERSOMMER is a festival organized by the city of Idar-Oberstein and sponsored by Kreissparkasse Birkenfeld, Effgen Schleiftechnik, OIE AG, the Bürkle Foundation and the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. More information about this year's program will be published soon at www.idar-oberstein.de/theatersommer.