etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center

A Date With Catherine Duquette is a live game / an improvised speed-dating event / a quest to find love in one hour or less!

This participatory performance explores love and attraction and the personas by which we pursue them. Catherine Duquette has created four distinct dating profiles based on four personas abstracted from her everyday identity.

YOU the audience are her date. You are full of possibility. You are an invitation for an intimate encounter, self-projection, or an awkward exchange. YOU the audience are also her competition. You are her gauge. You are an invitation for self-evaluation and self-deprecation.

YOU shape the way Catherine’s story unfolds. Laugh, lie, dance, and sigh. Expect to make one hot mess. Together, you and Catherine will explore the modern search for timeless romance.

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This work springs from the idea that social media and online dating sites have changed the way many of us look at love. Such platforms have created a hypermarket of desire, where users perform agency in the vast assemblage of potential mates. Users curate personal profiles, often tendering the best, most marketable versions of themselves, while identifying desirable partner attributes and browsing their options. Despite a clear commodification of self and relationships, we cannot dismiss online romance altogether as a mere commodified process of the “real thing”. In fact, its systems of commodification may help us understand and come to terms with the exact nature of attraction and the complexities of self-identification. Join Catherine to navigate love through a contemporary lens.

In a time dominated by social media, rapid data consumption and curated identities, Berlin-based performer and writer Catherine Duquette strives for closeness and connection. She specializes in audience-performer relationships, movement and improvisational scores. Her performances exact moments of heightened awareness and honesty on stage in an effort to dissolve the barriers that shape how we perceive and (dis)connect with the world around us. Her solo work has been supported by MOMENTUM Berlin, English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center, a Fulbright Fellowship in Spain, the International Festival of the Delphic Games in Greece and the Subterranean Art House in Berkeley, California. Catherine studied theater at Arizona State University and the British American Drama Academy in Oxford, England. She earned her master’s degree in Performance Studies from New York University prior to relocating to Germany. Despite frequent moves, Catherine calls the Sonoran Desert of Arizona home.