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

Performance