etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center

A Conversation with a Cultural Icon II

In the summer of 1976, pop star David Bowie moves from Los Angeles to Berlin. Why Berlin? Was he attracted by the mixture of Weimar nostalgia, isolated Wall city and niche location for the new music that would later be called Krautrock? In fact, he created radically new music in Berlin in the following two years, recorded both an anthem and a legendary album with `Heroes´, made a curious Weimar-era film with Just a Gigolo, and then disappeared into the pop-synthetic eighties.

In 1987, Bowie returned to Berlin to give a concert in front of the Reichstag, a stone´s throw away from the Wall. East Berliners who came to the Brandenburger Tor to listen started shouting “Bring down the Wall” – the first domino in a series of many that led to the fall of the Wall?

With a performative mixture of music, dance and text, Bowie in Berlin – as the second part of the series `Conversations with a Cultural Icon´ after Jaws / Der weiße Hai –  explores the area where pop touches our lives: as music, as film, as art, as an attitude to life.

Today, the three albums of the so-called `Berlin Trilogy´ are considered the artistic highlight of David Bowie´s career.With his creative curiosity, he went through very different artistic phases in the course of his long career, thus appealing to a new audience each time, and ultimately even to a new generation.

Nowadays, David Bowie is no longer just a pop star, but an important artist, to whom renowned museums dedicated a major exhibition ten years ago. Berlin officials even had a plaque placed on his home in Schöneberg.

Somehow, Bowie touches everyone. How? What does he have to say? What makes him a pop star, what makes him an artist? And why Berlin?