DOTA sings Kaléko

DOTA is dedicating its current concert program to the great Berlin poet Mascha Kaléko. Kaléko's poems tell pointedly, directly, and with fine humor about everyday life, love, friendship, loneliness, social upheaval, and the small and large challenges of life.

Dota Kehr discovered Kaléko's texts through a fan and was immediately captivated by her clear, reduced language and her immediacy to life. This led to the idea of setting the poems to music. The first album of Kaléko adaptations was released in 2020 and became a great success. A second followed later and opened up further facets from Kaléko's collections of poems, essays, and notes.

Together with her band, DOTA gives the texts new musical colors. Folk, indietronica, and Brazilian influences meet a varied instrumentation and make the nearly one hundred-year-old poems sound remarkably contemporary. In addition to songs from the two Kaléko albums, some pieces with original lyrics are also on the program.

In 2026, DOTA will be back with this special program at selected concerts. The band members include Dota Kehr (vocals, guitar), Janis Görlich (drums), Jan Rohrbach (guitar), Jonas Hauer (keyboards), Wencke Wollny (saxophone), and Antonia Hausmann (trombone). An acoustic concert evening that brings Mascha Kaléko's poetic observations into the present.