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Blog Archive

Sales of a Deadman

Only a suitcase remains of our salesman.

Our story picks up where Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman left off: after the suicidal car crash and subsequent funeral, everyone is still out to make money. This version of purgatory is all about selling, as death has now also become part of the vicious economic cycle. It is now a marketplace where the human being has been transformed into a commodity with their stories, relationships and memories all just waiting to be bought and sold.

This is the world premiere of a new production and interpretation of the composition Sales of a Deadman by Evan Gardner.

Originally performed in 2014, this new staging features a whole new cast and artistic team, reexamining the role of work-life balance in a post-pandemic, post-patriarchial leaning society, in which capitalism and its place in the marketplace of life is turned on its head and questioned vigorously.

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NoViolet Bulawayo

Black History Month/The U.S. Embassy Literature Series 2023 – NoViolet Bulawayo reads from her novels We Need New Names and Glory

Moderated by Anne Potjans, Humboldt University

NoViolet Bulawayo is the author of the novels Glory and We Need New Names, which was recognized with the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Pen/Hemingway Award, the LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Etisalat Prize for Literature, the Fred Brown Literary Award, the Betty Trask Award, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award (second place) and the National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Fiction Selection. We Need New Names was also shortlisted for the International Literature Award, the Man Booker Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. NoViolet earned her MFA at Cornell University where she was a recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship. She has taught fiction writing at Cornell and Stanford Universities. She grew up in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and is currently writing full-time from the wherevers.

The most translated author in modern Zimbabwean history, she is the first Black African Woman to be selected for the Booker List twice, and is one of only two African writers, the other being Chigozie Obioma, to be listed for both her debut and follow-up novel.

novioletbulawayo.com/

Since October 2022, Anne Potjans has been a postdoctoral researcher in the EU-funded research project Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary. Aesthetics, Affects, Archives at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she currently investigates the relationship between queer subcultural spaces and discourses on race and racism in Germany and the United States. Earlier in 2022, she completed her doctoral degree with a dissertation on “‘Why Are You So Angry?’” – The Uses of Rage and Anger in Black Feminist Literature” in the American Studies program at Humboldt and is a joint winner of Peter Lang’s competition New Perspectives in Black Studies, for which she received a publishing contract with Peter Lang in 2021.  Apart from that, she has worked on diasporic connections between African American and Black German feminist autobiographical writing in the post-World War II period and the intersections of Blackness, sexuality, and racial visibility in German film productions. She was an exchange faculty in the Honors program at the University of Washington in the fall of 2019 and has presented and published her research both nationally and internationally.

Casual Baggage

The U.S. Embassy Literature Series | International Holocaust Remembrance Day: Selected Readings from the Play Casual Baggage by Michael Lederer

With Harvey Friedman as Ivo, Daniel Grave as Michael, Sarai Cole as Rada, Mareile Metzner as Player One, and Alexander Schröder as Player Two

Followed by a discussion with the playwright, moderated by Daniel Brunet

Based on the true story of a small group of Jewish refugees admitted into America during WWII. Numbering less than a thousand, they were kept behind barbed wire in an internment camp upstate NY until the war’s end. Years later, one survivor from that group finds it easier to share his story with a young Black woman he has just met than with his own US-American-born son.

Michael Lederer is a playwright, poet, novelist, short story writer and essayist. He was born in Princeton, New Jersey, where his father Ivo Lederer was a professor of Contemporary European Diplomatic History. He grew up in New Haven, New York City, and Palo Alto, California. Lederer has lived in London, Spain, Vienna, Dubrovnik, and Berlin. Member Dramatists Guild, SAG-AFTRA, AEA, PEN International, National Arts Club, NYC, Players Club, NYC. B.A., Theatre Arts, Binghamton University. Original acting member of Tony award-winning TheatreWorks in Palo Alto. Founding Artistic Director of Dubrovnik Shakespeare Festival, 2009-2012. His script Saving America was a 2019 winner PAGE International Screenwriting Award. His novel Cadaques was selected by the U.S. Embassy Berlin for their US-American Literature Series 2014. He has published two collections of short stories, The Great Game: Berlin-Warsaw Express and Other Stories, 2012; also In the Widdle Wat of Time, 2016. He has written for Politico and contributes regular essays about politics and expat life to the American Studies Journal.

Learning Feminism From Rwanda

Women in Europe are still fighting for what Rwanda achieved long ago: 62% of their members of parliament are female. In Germany, the figure is just 34%. This East African country declared gender parity the basis of its politics in 1994. Meanwhile in Germany, this kind of parity is still a long way off despite gender equality being enshrined in common law since 1949.

A Rwandan and a German performer discuss numbers and realities from both countries, using a drum as the central symbol of power. They take a peek behind the curtain: if women are empowered, how do men deal with losing their power and what are the lines of confrontation in the home? How slowly or quickly do quotas change a culture and the mindset of a nation?

With speeches, statistics, songs and protest choreography, Learning Feminism from Rwanda follows the trail of Rwandan fast-track feminism from shiny statistics and glass ceilings to hearth and home. Let’s see how much Europe can learn from Rwanda?

Due to the COVID-19 crisis, three performers from Kigali will be present on video and one German and one Rwandan performer will be live on stage.

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Die Wiederaufnahme wird gefördert vom Fonds Darstellende Künste aus Mitteln der Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien im Rahmen von NEUSTART KULTUR. These additional performances are supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

Heartburn

Two women face the truth of the dissolution of the European egalitarian dream.

Everywhere they look things are not equal; in the taxi at the end of the night, on the bench in the middle of a village, in the congregation, in the boardroom, in the home. They tell stories of abortion, sing about violence and dance about menopause. They remember the lies they were told as children and question the hope that things might be different for future generations.

The performance uses puppetry, comedy, song, text and movement to create a hybrid, humorous and powerful perspective on being a woman in Europe today.

“For it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve” – Timothy 2:1

————-> HEARTBURN show trailer

Performed in English, Polish and Spanish with English surtitles

The Workshop

Your Story: A workshop for everyone who has ever identified as a woman – suitable for +15 – led by British visual artist Jo Johnston and the Heartburn cast.

The workshop will be held on Saturday, January 28 from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm. Attendance is free of charge, but you must register in advance by sending an email to info@cosmino.org

After seeing the performance of Heartburn, we invite you to attend a free follow up creative workshop where you will work with members of the artistic team to create “story collages” of your experiences and feelings.

The new works of art created in the in workshop can then be uploaded to our website www.heartburnwomen.com

The Cactus League

The U.S. Embassy Literature Series: Emily Nemens in conversation with Musa Okwonga

Emily Nemens reads from her debut novel The Cactus League and talks with Musa Okwonga about baseball and its impact on US-American society, identity, fan culture, literature and the Picador Guest Professorship.

This event is part of the U.S. Embassy Literature Series and is presented by the Picador Guest Professorship for Literature in cooperation with the U.S. Embassy and the English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center.

I Love EU?

A Performative Examination of the EU

Can the European Union be an inspiration for a peaceful postnational world? Is it the non plus ultra expression of what the continent learned from two world wars? Or is it an incredibly strained construct that falls apart at the first signs of a crisis? How does a Eurocentric view differ from that of the increasing number of people forced to leave their homelands and gather at the borders of Europe and the EU in hopes of survival and a dignified existence?

Four performers explore these questions using 50 interviews conducted with EU citizens and non-EU citizens to create an open and interactive evening of theater.

In English and other languages

European Drama from Poland and Ukraine

Staged Reading and Panel Discussion

European Drama from Poland and Ukraine

Reading and panel discussion with Olha Mazjupa and Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk

Theater scholar Iwona Uberman and translator Andreas Volk introduce the Polish playwright Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk and the Ukrainian playwright Olha Mazjupa. We will read from their texts Der Schriftsteller (Sikorska-Miszczuk) and Richtung Osten fliegt der Ball (Mazjupa). We will discuss with the authors how a Polish playwright came to write a play about Salman Rushdie in the year 2020 and whether the socially critical comedy by a Ukrainian author might still provoke laughter in 2022. We will also ask the authors why drama from Poland and Ukraine has such a hard time finding its way onto German-language stages.

“For me, Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk is a theatrical free spirit. The protagonists of her plays are often well-known personalities from (contemporary) history, through whom she deals with the great existential questions in an ironic and entertaining way. In doing so, she always succeeds masterfully in maintaining the balance between the seriousness of the content and our grotesque reality,” explains Andreas Volk (translator of Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk).

The statement from the Heidelberger Stückemarkt jury describes Olha Mazjupa as finding “many different scenic styles to make her story shine and to escalate the scenario – small, sharp, gruff dialogues, silent scenes of everyday tasks, surreal images. Olha Mazjupa’s text is what, absurdly, a play must be, an unfinished work of art that cries out for the stage where it is to be finished.”

 

Olha Mazjupa, born in 1988 in Pidbirzi near Lviv, is a playwright and theater studies scholar. She studied Serbian language and literature at the Ivan Franko University Lviv and graduated with a PhD from the Marie Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin in theater and literary studies. Her plays have been performed in Lviv, Chust, Sievierodonetsk and Chernivtsi, and she has worked with theatres in Rzeszów and Sosnowiec. In 2017, her play Öko-Ballade won the internation author prize at the Heidelberger Stückemarkts.

 

 

Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk is a multi-award winning playwright, librettist and scriptwriter in Poland and abroad. She studied journalism and political science at the University of Warsaw. She is also a graduate of the scriptwriting program at the State School for Film, Theater and TV in Łódź. Recipient of scholarships from CEC ArtsLink in the USA, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Stiftung Genshagen. Author of plays that are performed both in the original and in translation, as well as radio plays, opera libretti, film scripts and plays for children. In 2011, she was invited to the Berliner Stückemarkt.

 

 

We are very pleased to partner with Drama Panorama to host this event. Please click HERE to read the complete event information on their website.

Salvation (Glitter Doesn’t Care I’m A Boy)

A science fiction drag ritual and an experimental invocation for a constant distribution of desires based on visions and fantasies Shlomi Moto Wagner has experienced since he was three years old.

It explores transformations, mutations and remanifestations of the idea of being, the sensuality of being a body, the politics of having
a body and the poetics of sharing a bodily experience.

This solo music theater piece is a mythological and poetic reading of current pop culture and its academic discourse. The music of ancient
Jewish texts and invocations together with visionary tunes of composer Hildegard von Bingen from the 12th century is newly arranged with pop hits, techno compositions and contemporary feminist texts. All of this makes the opera performance a ritual of transformation.

Shlomi Moto Wagner is Mazy Mazeltov, is Wendy Williams, is Wisława Szymborska, is Fran Drescher, is Hélène Cixous and her Medusa is David Copperfield and Claudia Schiffer IN ONE BODY! And much, much more.

So, what is reality here and what is fiction? In times where a part of society wants to return to the gender roles of the 1950s, or even the 1940s, it is that much more critical to celebrate a festival of the imagination. Let’s make magic. And what comes out at the end? A concert, a drag queen musical, a monologue slam, a magic show, a bar mitzvah or simply a party with the people? Are the props ready? Powder, lipstick and glitter? All right!

Yellow Banana

Let’s take a little vacation right in the middle of Berlin! We’ll leave our cares behind and dive into a new world of the unknown. We are celebrating the two-hundred-and-fifty millionth birthday of the Eurasian Plate with a culinary feast, a very special Janchi. This distinctive atonement ritual between Europe and Asia will be commemorated by none other than the one-of-a-kind, authentic banana (“yellow on the outside, white on the inside”) Olivia Hyunsin Kim!