Loosely based on Samuel Beckett´s Waiting for Godot and inspired by the deep frustrations experienced in the time of the pandemic, BIYT presents an investigation into the perplexing questions that will just not go away.
You know the story, two friends wait endlessly for something. They try to do things right. They really do. But it´s just taking too darn long and soon trouble arrives offering a welcome distraction. We have all been there…
Now Anali is in Berlin and wants to celebrate spring but can’t because the world stinks. She doesn’t have any money, there are shitty images on the streets and shitty songs in her head. The shit is hitting the fan on a daily basis. In between one shit storm and the next, Anali wants to get some fresh mountain air and is planning her trip to Dreckloch in the Alps. But before she can do that, she has to get her shit together and earn some cash to pay off her debts in the neighborhood like the good old days before individual toilet stalls were invented.
You can look forward to an evening full of real old shit watching some really shitty performers give their all and do what they like doing most…while wearing some shitty costumes with some shitty lighting and a shitty host.
“This is part of my ongoing artistic research on developing performance strategies to decolonize my body and its representation as an Asian person within the European hegemony. In S.O.A.R. Queen, I turn my research focus on my queer Asian body. Western queer culture and theory are overwhelmingly used as the point of reference in mainstream discourse and understanding of queerness, whitewashing the queer expressions of other cultures. I see this as a form of cultural colonization. As an expansionist project, colonialism is as much about occupying foreign territories, as it is about appropriating culturally-othered bodies and erasing their cultural contexts, histories and knowledge.
In this research, my aim is to develop performance strategies to decolonize queerness through the use of drag as a tool to challenge and de-center the hegemonic west-centric notion of queerness, as well as, disrupt the heteropatriarchal norms in Chinese culture. The task is to construct conceptual prototypes for a decolonial and anti-patriarchal drag, which takes its central reference from the male-to-female impersonation in Chinese opera called Nan Dan (男旦).
S.O.A.R. Queen is supported by the Berliner Förderprogramm Künstlerische Forschung (2022-23). Over a period of 2 years, I work with the 3 archetypal female roles that are most celebrated in Chinese opera: 1) the warrior, 2) the lover and 3) the concubine. This first phase of the research is dedicated to the female warrior: Mulan (花木兰).”
– Ming Poon
Followed by a post-performance discussion
Following the complicated lure of genealogy, Stolowitz goes back to Berlin to bring the story of her unknown ancestors out of the archives into the light. The record keeps as many secrets as it shares; how do people become verschollen, lost, like library books?
A limited number of free tickets have been reserved for student groups and their teachers. Please register as soon as possible by email at tickets@etberlin.de
Complete funding for this production has been generously provided by the U.S. Embassy in Berlin.
Andrea Stolowitz is a German/American playwright currently living and working in Cork, Ireland. Her work embraces bold theatricality ranging from intimate portrayals of the human condition to the intersection of national history on private lives. Andrea is a member of New Dramatists class of 2026, an alumna of The Playwrights’ Center, and a collaborating writer with the internationally lauded devised theater company Hand2Mouth Theatre. Andrea is the Lacroute Playwright-in-Residence at Artists Repertory Theater. Andrea has taught at Duke University, NYU, UC-San Diego, Willamette University and NUI-Galway.
In the meantime, we’ve spent hours and hours at home; working for money, working out, working out our social lives, working without being paid for it, working on better sleep. How has this time changed our ideas of home? What do we need in order to feel at home? What else can be a home apart from the physical space we live in? And what happens when three performers finally come back to a space they haven’t been to in a while – a theater?
During the residency at ETB | IPAC, Rule of Three Collective will re-embark on an open journey towards notions of home and share some of the findings at the end of the week. Join us back home!
Followed by a post-performance discussion
What languages does Berlin write in? In varying locations, PARATAXE regularly invites Berlin authors, who pen their work in languages other than German, to take part in conversations, readings and new translations.
With Aboud Saeed (& his translator Sandra Hetzl) and Avrina Prabala-Joslin!
An evening in German, English and Arabic – with translations. Hosted by Martin Jankowski (Berliner Literarische Aktion).
Aboud Saeed was born in 1983 in a small town near Aleppo, Syria where he worked in a blacksmith’s workshop for 15 years. Then he became an active blogger on Facebook. After his first book, Der klügste Mensch im Facebook mit Statusmeldungen, was published in German translation in 2013, he came to Germany as a Syrian author. He continued writing in Berlin, between asylum and alienation, and his life-sized news ticker, about childhood and youth in Syria, was published. He returned to his first profession as a metalworker in Olafur Eliasson’s studio. His new book Die ganze Geschichte has recently been published.
Sandra Hetzl was born in Munich in 1980 and lives in Beirut. She studied Visual Culture Studies at the Berlin University of the Arts. She works as a literary translator from Arabic and makes video installations. In addition, she is the brain behind 10/11. A laboratory and, simultaneously, a mouthpiece for experimental forms of Arabic literature, 10/11 is based in Beirut and Berlin. The collective consists of writers, translators and international publishing professionals. 10/11 makes texts (often snatched from the depths of the WWW) by young writers working in Arabic accessible to the international publishing market and strives to nurture dynamic exchange.
Avrina Prabala-Joslin writes fiction and poetry on the fluidity of things, place, space and time. She is obsessed with memories, of childhood – they pervade and evade, an ebb and flow characteristic of her desire for the sea. Currently, she is a doctoral researcher at the University of Göttingen and is working on theorizing feminist digital memory. She has an MA in writing from the University of Warwick and has published on a few platforms such as Elsewhere Lit, Bird’s Thumb and Coldnoon. Apart from performing at spoken word events, she posts snippets of poetry on Instagram (@avrinajoslin). Her short story “The Plumage” was shortlisted for the 2019 Berlin Writing Prize. Avrina Prabala-Joslin is currently compiling a collection of feminist short fiction. After having lived in many cities in India, England, Italy and Romania, she recently found home in Berlin.
PARATAXE is a project of the Berliner Literarische Aktion e.V. and is supported by Berlin’s Senate Department for Culture and Europe. Further information can be found at www.stadtsprachen.de.
Exotic is warm and spicy. It is one letter away from erotic. It promises adventure. Exotic is somewhere far away and foreign. Exotic is strange, but also very appealing and desirable. It is always over there, not here; them, not us; you, never me. Exotic is dark and mysterious, but its threat is tamed and contained.
The exotic industry has become a big and lucrative market, offering goods and services ranging from food, fashion, music, books, health products, workshops, collectibles, antiques to cultural attractions, theme events, tourism and corporate branding. It has often been touted as a fun and light way to promote the appreciation and experience of foreign cultures. But is it as innocent as it appears? What lurks beneath its foreigner-friendly surface? This collaborative performance invites the audience to see what it takes to create the ideal exotic look.
Drawing on his personal experience as a dancer of Asian origin, Ming Poon looks at how eurocentrism, globalization and cultural consumerism contribute to the exoticization of his body for the art market. Approaching the body as a site on which meanings, values and boundaries are inscribed, he interrogates how the exotic gaze displaces and appropriates his body, turning it into a cultural commodity and a symbol of subjugation. Exotic Animal both invites and confronts the exotic gaze. Staring defiantly back, it attempts to shift the power relation between the gazer and itself.
Warning: This performance contains cultural stereotypes and the white/racialized gaze.
Ming Poon is a Berlin-based choreographer who began his career as professional dancer in 1993 and started to develop his choreographic practice in 2010. He creates choreographic interventions, where spectators are invited to exercise their agency to create change. His works are interactive and collaborative in design. They usually take the form of collaborative performances, public interventions and one-to-one encounters. He works with vulnerability, care, peripherality and failure as performance strategy.
His practice is influenced by Buddhist concept of interdependence and care, Judith Butler’s resistance in vulnerability, Augusto Boal’s theater of the oppressed and Nicolas Bourriaud’s micro-utopias.
His works have been presented at Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay (Singapore), The Substation (Singapore), English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center (Berlin, Germany), Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin, Germany), Scenario Pubblico | Centro Nazionale di Produzione della Danza (Catania, Italy) and Südpol (Luzern, Switzerland).
Nick Laird is a lawyer, poet, novelist and critic from County Tyrone, Northern Ireland.
He lives in London and New York. His essays, reviews and poems have appeared in various journals in Britain and America. Nick Laird’s most recent books are the poetry collection Feel Free and the novel Modern Gods. He is on faculty at New York University, and the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queens’ University, Belfast.
will feature contemporary writing from Northern Ireland 24 – 26 February 2022.
Glenn Patterson, the renowned novelist, non-fiction writer and Director at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast will chair the British Council Literature Seminar 2022. Northern Irish writers Nick Laird, Lucy Caldwell, Abby Oliveira, Michelle Gallen, Bebe Ashley and Padraig Reagan will present readings, discussions, and workshops
The seminar will consist of two public readings by Glenn Patterson and Nick Laird, a spoken word performance by Abby Oliveira , readings by Michelle Gallen and Lucy Caldwell, two panel discussions and four author-led workshops.
The seminar will offer academics, students, publishers, translators and journalists from across Europe the chance to experience some of the best of Northern Irish literature and engage with writers and their work first-hand.
Read more about the British Council Literature Seminar here.
Renowned Norther Irish author and Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre Belfast Glenn Patterson will read from (quote) “New books, older books and maybe a couple of things on which the ink has only just dried” The session will be moderated by Prof. Felix Sprang and is the opening of the British Council Literature Seminar 2022 Neu NI Now featuring contemporary writing from Northern Ireland
Glenn Patterson will read from his latest works “Where Are We Now?” and “The Last Irish Question: Will Six into Twenty-Six Ever Go?”
will feature contemporary writing from Northern Ireland, 24 – 26 February 2022.
Glenn Patterson, the renowned novelist, non-fiction writer and Director at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast will chair the British Council Literature Seminar 2022. Northern Irish writers Nick Laird, Lucy Caldwell, Abby Oliveira, Michelle Gallen, Bebe Ashley and Padraig Reagan will present readings, discussions, and workshops.
The seminar will consist of two public readings by Glenn Patterson and Nick Laird, a spoken word performance by Abby Oliveira , readings by Michelle Gallen and Lucy Caldwell, two panel discussions and four author-led workshops.
The seminar will offer academics, students, publishers, translators and journalists from across Europe the chance to experience some of the best of Northern Irish literature and engage with writers and their work first-hand.
Read more about the British Council Literature Seminar here.
Journalist Alice Kennings grapples with how to act after uncovering the identity of an alt-right podcast host calling for violence against the media.
Based on real events, White Heat is a play about all the things we justify to ourselves.
“In White Heat, Isador explores the continuum between trolls who target writers on the internet – especially women and people of colour – and true-life terror, such as the mass shooting at The Capital newspaper in Maryland in 2018 that left five journalists dead.” The Globe and Mail
Graham Isador
Jill Harper