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Berlin International Performing Arts Center

Blog Archive

Darragh McLoughlin

World-renowned Irish performer and circus artist Darragh McLoughlin presents a double bill! With Stickman and The Fulfillment, he turns all expectations of circus and storytelling on their head and paints a portrait of the shared moment in the theater space.

Stickman

Stickman is a performance which features a man, a stick and a TV.

The man balances the stick on various parts of his body, thereby setting himself and the stick in motion.

If the man has an agenda, he keeps it to himself.

The stick gets moved around and balanced by the man seeming to not have much to say.

The TV lurks in the background and throughout the performance puts titles on whatever the man and the stick are doing; thus attempting to dictate what the audience see.

All the while the audience watches and tries to keep up with the ever changing rules of play.

Then the TV titles them. ‘WATCHERS’.

Stickman is an exploration of our relationships with meaning, empathy and agency.

“The phantasmagoric movements created by each meticulously calculated move and the deep exploration of each stick elicited occasional voices of pure “wow” and “wow” from the audience. It was leaking.” Mayu Yoshihira (Daily Journal Editorial Department)
“I watched the whole thing unfold with excitement. That’s the only rule of the space magic called theater.” Sae Shimaizawa (Daily Journal Editorial Department)

 

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The Fulfillment

To fulfill: (verb)

1.    achieve or realize (something desired, promised, or predicted).

2.    carry out (a duty or role) as required, promised, or expected.

The Fulfillment is a modular, audience-driven performance built around a simple mechanic: an empty frame and a title. What happens next is determined by those present, and gradually as the fulfilled frames accumulate, an unpredictable live exhibition emerges, shaped entirely by those present.

Each performance becomes a portrait of our collective moment.

Darren McLoughlin was born in 1987 in Ireland as youngest of three siblings and son of two professional chefs. In 2006 he moved to Berlin to attend the Jonglier Katakomben School of Juggling. In 2008, he attended the Academy for Circus and Performance Art and completed his education with a bachelor degree in Circus Arts. In 2014, he was selected as a Circus Next laureate with Fragments of a Mind and has since created several acclaimed works: The Whistle, Stickman and For as Long as We’re Here. Besides his performance work he has created conceptual artwork series: The Fulfillment, Stories of Falling Objects, Variations of Stickman and WATCHERS.

Darragh teaches at different professional institutions around Europe: FLIC Scuola di Circo, ACAPA, Die Etage, CODARTS and Les Beaux Arts, HMDK Stuttgart.

Underneath

Sticks and stones didn’t break Her bones, but words and pointing crushed Her.
Is Beauty really only skin deep?

Does Ugliness hide somewhere deeper?

This stunning play is a blackly comic, rich and vivid tale of a life lived in secret, a testament to the people who live on the fringes, under the nose of everyday life. It explores the surface, and what lies underneath.

Following performances both Silent and King as part of our Irish Theatre Berlin festival, ETB | IPAC is very pleased to welcome Pat Kinevan and Jim Culleton back with Underneath.

WINNER Adelaide Fringe Best Theatre Award, Adelaide Fringe Festival 2015
WINNER Scotsman Fringe First, Edinburgh Festival 2015
WINNER Stage Raw Best Solo Performer Award, Los Angeles
FORBES’ BEST THEATER ON BROADWAY AND BEYOND LIST

“Like Olivier’s legendary Hamlet, this is one of those rare performances that will be talked about for decades to come… exciting, hilarious, harrowing and heart breaking… A devastatingly brilliant piece of theatre.”
★★★★★  Examiner.com

 

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Elly Jarvis

THE LAB: Artist and Audience Development

Elly Jarvis is a theater maker of many passions and interests, who wholeheartedly believes in play as an emancipatory and transcendental act and theater as a forum for examining polemics, for encouraging dialogue and for inviting humans to listen and to witness. Trained classically at the University of Michigan in Theater Performance, she received her Master’s in Theater Education at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she taught her first course on devising theater summer semester 2025. Her work is almost always participatory: such as Blaupause (FELD Theater 2024/2025), an interactive children’s theater piece about sadness in conjunction with the color blue; currently she is working on a piece called The Very Best! (Das Allerbeste!) with an inclusive group and the RambaZambaTheater. Elly works regularly for the Berliner Ensemble, the Deutsche Oper and does KulturMachtStark projects for the ATZE Musiktheater.

For Elly, theater is a marvelous excuse to dig deep into questions that tantalize her, it pushes her to find aesthetic forms that expand her understanding of that which makes her curious. Many things make her curious, but the primary list is currently: snails, colors, slowness, dialogue, sidewalks, lifestyles, boundaries, gender, arrangements, impressions, visual arts and paintings, to name a few.

In her residency, Elly will dive deep into one of her curiosities in a manner that is participatory and stimulating to the audience. She will be recently back from the United States and full of impressions, photographs, interviews and certainly some concerns. Expect a work-in-progress with a deep foundation in research and exploration, an invitation to participate in this exploration and an open-ended question.

Followed by a post-performance discussion

Puddles

What language does love speak? Does speaking multiple languages give us multiple personalities? What goes beyond language and right into our bodies?

Set in Berlin between the 1990s and now, Puddles is about a love triangle between three university friends, Judith, Max and Nora. Max and Judith were childhood sweethearts but broke up when Judith went traveling. Max and Nora got together, stayed together, married, bought a flat and are trying for a baby. These best-laid plans, however, as well all know, often go awry…

In this version, Max only speaks German, Judith only English and Nora switches between the two.

The LAB reading will be the very first work-in-progress presentation of the new multilingual version of the play, followed by a post-performance discussion.

Trigger warning: the play addresses sensitive topics, including discussion of miscarriage.

No One Comes Back

When one twin goes to war, can the other escape it?

When her twin brother is deployed as a fighter pilot, a sister finds herself in a war she never signed up for. Bombings, cornfields, deer eyeballs and shamans, No One Comes Back is a story about war, twinhood and what it means to save each other when no one really comes back.

The play moves between rural US-American childhood and the wildly different paths the twins take as adults. One heads into military service, the other into art school, Berlin and a string of questionable survival strategies. With humor and candor, it asks how families carry violence by proxy, how love persists under pressure, and if late-night phone calls can bridge the distance between two twins at risk of losing themselves.

This raw and unforgettable new play explores the ways we wage war and the complicated love that shapes us, whether we want it to or not.

omfg hamlet do i look like i care

William Shakespeare and the Bechdel Test

How much agency do female characters have in works of fiction? In 1986, US-American cartoonist Alison Bechdel provided a simple set of rules for figuring this out: the Bechdel test. Are there at least two female characters in the work? Do they speak to each other? About something other than men?

In all of William Shakespeare’s thirty-six plays, there is exactly one overlooked scene in a mostly overlooked play (Richard II) where two women converse.

With this in mind, omfg hamlet do i look like i care questions the supposed universality of Shakespeare’s themes. Combining Shakespearean language with modern dialogue and original text by creator/actor Kay Marie, the production investigates what happens when women are finally allowed the stage — and the conversation — all to themselves.

Two powerhouse performers take on a multitude of roles, including queens, noblewomen, podcast hosts, karaoke singers, dancers and professional bowlers. A male actor appears in a deliberately sidelined supporting role, used purely as a narrative device. What begins as an absurdly comic interview between two clueless influencers soon spirals into a chaotic, heartfelt, and surprisingly tender journey through female experience — both real and imagined.

Ein Sumpf bildet sich

“I love Germany. But in Germany now there is a swamp forming. At the moment just a swamp. But give it just a few more years. The swamp becomes a lake. The lake becomes a sea. And it swallows everything up.”

Staying with a German family while running a project in their local village school, a British-Iranian teacher contends with ancestral guilt, a possessed scarecrow and a rising tide of Islamophobia.

Followed by a post-performance discussion with playwright Charlie Dupré, moderated by Daniel Brunet

Cynthia

A drag-puppet-theater spectacle about the world’s first non-human influencer from 1937

Cynthia was a model, an influencer, a socialite, a celebrity and a household name in the USA in 1937. But unlike other celebrities of her day, she was dismantled into pieces at the end of her day and stowed away in a body bag. Cynthia was a mannequin. Her creator, Lester Gaba, a window display designer in New York City, became her manager, puppeteer and chaperone. He escorted her to dinner clubs, theater premieres and fashion shows,  as well as performing for her and responding to  her adoring fans on her behalf.

Let this delightful fever dream of a show take you down the slippery slope from entertaining spectacle into the uncanny valley.

Featuring Berlin Drag King Alexander Cameltoe as Lester Gaba, with his world animated by an ensemble of puppeteers.

Letters From Chiran

Letters from Chiran is a piece of mask theater performed by Tomoya Kawamura, inspired freely by the historical facts of the last world war and the stories left behind by young Japanese soldiers at the local shokudo (canteen) just outside the military airbase of Chiran in southern Japan.

The play delicately reveals the difference of perspectives between the lives of ordinary people in the midst of a largely devastating war and those who lightly make the decision of joining a conflict, compromising the lives of millions in the name of false ideals and personal satisfaction.

In 1945, the pilots of the Japanese Special Attack Units, commonly known as kamikaze, would share some of their stories, hopes and dreams with the owner of the shokudo while having a meal or a green tea before beginning what was, for many of them, their final mission.

Thanks to the owner of the shokudo, some of their last letters were hidden from the military censorship. She secretly delivered them to pilots’ families once the war was over.

Letters from Chiran forces us to ask: is there any scenario where sacrifice like this is acceptable?

A Suffocating Choking Feeling

Would you lie for likes?

A Suffocating Choking Feeling is a razor-sharp, satirical deep-dive into the warped world of Insta-“truth”, where fact and fiction blur and what wins is having a story worth telling.

Inspired by Australian con artist Belle Gibson (the subject of Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar & BBC’s Bad Influencer), who lied about having cancer to earn likes as a wellness influencer, this award-winning explosive solo show smashes together live theater with interactive social media experiments, inviting you to scroll, troll and cancel Simone Hamilton.

A Suffocating Choking Feeling plays with the boundaries of truth and ethics, testing audiences’ willingness to believe.

“Not shying away from the provocative”– The Guardian
“A notorious collision between social media and the truth” – The Age
“TomYumSim walk the fine line between madness and truth” – ★★★★ The Plus Ones
Winner of the Australian Green Room Award for best experimental and contemporary performance.

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