etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center

off-site event!
kottbusser tor, kreuzberg
Meeting point Kohlfurter Straße 33, 10999 Berlin!

there are only 30 tickets available for each performance. we highly recommend purchasing tickets in advance.

By copy & waste

winter was coming.
But we didn’t want to know.

Step right up and place your bid for a piece of Kreuzberg! Take part in an auction of the exotic! Enjoy the unbelievable feeling of not having to worry about anybody else!

It’s not great living in the 21st century: people have been protesting the rapidly rising rents for years at Kottbusser Tor in Kreuzberg. copy & waste will send the audience there for an audio walk – and right into a distribution conflict zone for living space, money and love. Under the headphones you’ll hear just what it sounds like – the divvying up of the loot.

While people from the East and West celebrated euphorically in 1989, one system began to swallow the other whole. The masters of global capital let their riches grow while the rest could only look on. Game of Zones: Property, cooperatives and biographies were offered up for the hunt, bagged and tagged.

But who wins when society erodes like this? Who were and are the big winners and losers of the distribution? And what happens to us when what is being divvied up is increasingly privatized, when we only want to own a thing or a person to earn profit from them?

It’s time to vehemently deny the claim that there hasn’t been a war here in seventy years. copy & waste will acoustically stage the big final battle: swords, war horses and dragons – all weapons are allowed in this civil war called privatization. After all, it’s already spread to remote parts of the city and into the body of each individual.

 

Featuring a short introduction and post-performance discussion on November 29 as part of Theater Scoutings Berlin!

 

Watch the trailer here:

 copy & waste is a performance collective based in Berlin. Founded in 2007 by Jörg Albrecht (writer) and Steffen Klewar (director and actor), copy & waste have been creating trans-media theater pieces and performances since then, always dealing with the changing cityscapes of the 21st century, with the blurring boundaries between fact and fiction. The team – while adjusting its line-up to every project – consists of actors, video artists, musicians/sound designers, stage designers, dramaturgs and workers from other disciplines.

The concept of analyzing power in urban spaces by performative means has led to different ways of working and aesthetic forms.

One of copy & waste’s approaches is to work in the black box in order to mirror rules of urban life in a highly concentrated form in the space of the theater; after their first work Wir Kinder vom Hauptbahnhof (Lehrer Bahnhof) in 2007 (100° Festival, Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, Schauspiel Frankfurt), they developed, among others, Berlin Ernstreuterplatz (2009, Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, uniT Graz), Orlac Hand Out (2010, uniT Graz, Ringlokschuppen Ruhr), Die blauen Augen von Terence Hill (2011, Hebbel am Ufer, Steirischer Herbst, Theaterhaus Jena) and Einsatz hinter der V.ierten Wand (Ringlokschuppen Ruhr 2013). In 2013, they also staged Barbarellapark, a musical about mobility in neoliberal times (Ringlokschuppen Ruhr, Theater Oberhausen).

In other productions, the group enters spaces already used by others and challenges their reality with artificial means. Accordingly, in 2008, copy & waste worked on Gropiopolis about the construction of Gropiusstadt for X Wohnungen Neukölln of HAU, in 2009, they produced Die Versteigerung von No. 36 in Kreuzberg’s West Germany about living in the past, present and future, and in 2010, they came up with WASTELER 1 & 2 for an architectural project working with prefabricated buildings and for a festival at Theater Chemnitz. For the festival Männer in Garagen of Sophiensäle Berlin (2014), copy & waste recruited the audience as members of their fictional boxing club (Rocky Cabinet).

From 2012 on, the group has also produced pieces that try to rethink the form of the audio play as a spatial medium: for the Dortmund-based theater festival FAVORITEN 2012, copy & waste created Cheap Throat, a site-specific performance speaking about a connection between pornography and city marketing. Following up in 2013 was Enid Blytons Geheimnis um den unsichtbaren Reichtum einer Gesellschaft, die nur sich will, an audio installation with one actor and a dog. In late 2014, copy & waste present a performative audio walk called Nasty Peace at Kottbusser Tor in Berlin-Kreuzberg, addressing the topics of rising rents and privatization of public housing since 1989, in cooperation with English Theatre Berlin | International Center for Performing Arts and NOrth Europe/WestGermany.

Beside their performative work, copy & waste have produced the web soap Andy Girls (2009) and, as a belated movie version of the series: ANDY GIRLS – Alles, was wir über Theater wissen, lernten wir vom Porno (2013, created for the project ThAEtermaschine of Interrobang, Sophiensäle Berlin).

From 2012 to 2014 copy & waste and Ringlokschuppen Ruhr initiated a major try-out of how to produce site-specific theater in a shrinking region (the Ruhr area). This cooperation was funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation in its program Doppelpass, meant to promote collaboration between performance groups and theaters. In this period, four pieces by copy & waste premiered at Ringlokschuppen Ruhr. As a final, they both staged, supported by Urbane Künste Ruhr and Theater Oberhausen, a project called 54. Stadt, a theatrical tour with four performance groups (kainkollektiv, Invisible Playground, LIGNA, copy & waste); beside staging their production Anarchie in Ruhrstadt, copy & waste were also responsible for creating the setting for the whole event.

From 2014 to 2016, copy & waste are funded by Fonds Darstellende Künste, in 2015 and 2016 additionally by Berlin’s Senate. In this period, the group will stage three productions about the abolition of public spaces (PUBLIC SHOWDOWN), starting with Nasty Peace.

A production by copy & waste in co-production with English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center and WestGermany/NOrth Europe as part of the ETB | IPAC project 25 Jahre Mauerfall or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ossis/Wessis.

In cooperation with Kotti & Co, PirataPatata und Comebackpackers.

Funded by Regierender Bürgermeister von Berlin – Senatskanzlei – Kulturelle Angelegenheiten and Konzeptionsförderung des Fonds Darstellende Künste e.V. – aus Mitteln des Bundes-