etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center

Blog Archive

Parataxe – International Literature

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 Animal (Live)

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” – Audre Lorde

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

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.

The British Council Literature Seminar “Neu NI Now” 

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.

Glenn Patterson

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?”

  The British Council Literature Seminar “Neu NI Now” 

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.

White Heat

A revealed identity leads to an impossible decision.

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

FOCUS CANADA 2022

Graham Isador

Graham Isador is a writer based in Toronto. Best known for his time as a host and editor with VICE, Isador’s writing has appeared in GQ, Men’s Health, and The Globe and Mail. He is the author of several plays including Situational Anarchy and TRUCK.

 

Jill Harper

Jill is an award-winning theatre director and dramaturg, and the co-founder of Cue6 Theatre. Selected directing credits: Cue6 Theatre’s Dry Land (Globe and Mail’s Top 10 Theatre shows of 2018); pool (no water) (Dora Awards for Outstanding Direction and Outstanding Performance – Ensemble); and Byhalia, Mississippi (as a part of a 7-city World Premiere Conversation). Elsewhere – White Heat (Summerworks Festival); Consumption Patterns (Next Stage Theatre Festival); Meet Cute (Roseneath Theatre) – Dora nomination for Outstanding Direction with co-director Aaron Willis – Hazardous Materials (Equity Library Theatre Chicago); Twelfth Night and Macbeth (The Classical Theatre Project).

 

WAH WAH WAH

A young queer person grapples with the messiness of (MAYBE) being violated.

Wah Wah Wah follows one person’s muddled account of a very specific, yet familiar story. A gaze held too long, being followed down the street, a stranger’s hand on your bare thigh — the layers are peeled back, revealing a tangled inner dialogue surrounding instances of violation. What happens if I love it and hate it at the same time? Did anything even happen? Is anything ever gonna change?

Wah Wah Wah is a new and explosive performance work from Canada that dissects micro-moments of sexual harassment from a queer perspective using storytelling, tantrums, and visceral movement when words arent enough.

 

FOCUS CANADA 2022

______________________________________________________

Celia Green  (they/them)

is a queer and trans non-binary performer, performance creator, and choreographer. Their growth and learning has been greatly shaped by trainings and opportunities at The Paprika Festival, the AMY Project, La Pocha Nostra and the P.A.R.T.S summerschool for contemporary dance. Recently, Celia was involved as a choreographer in adelheid dance’s re:research program, and was a guest choreographer at Toronto Dance Theatre’s for their Pilot Episodes project. Celia is a recipient of the Theatre Centre Emerging Artist Award, and is also a birthworker. They are currently developing SOWWY, a new ensemble performance work that explores men, gender and apology.

 

Bilal Baig (they/them)

is a queer, trans-feminine, Muslim playwright, director, performer and workshop facilitator. Bilal’s first play, Acha Bacha, had its world premiere in 2018 and has been published by Playwrights Canada Press. Other written work in development includes Kainchee Lagaa, Kitne Saare Laloo Yahan Pey Hain, and I want that free mind! As a director/dramaturg, Bilal has worked on projects such as Wah Wah Wah (SummerWorks 2019), Eraser (RISER Project 2019), and The Trans Gemmes (Rhubarb Festival 2019-2020).

Photos by Tanja Terziani and Franny Chudnoff

This Gentle Moment

Hi Absalon,
in the cell,
in Tokyo or Paris?
you scream (at me)
I scream (at you)
we stay apart
we, meaning you
meaning gone
too
fast

With This Gentle Moment, I am creating a duet film for two performers built on the materialization and physicalization of encounters around queer lived experiences. In directing my attention to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, I want to set off on a choreographic reflection on living in and with a pandemic at a time when our society as a whole has been gripped by one anew.

This Gentle Moment is the first of a series of three works that are inspired by visual artists who passed away from HIV/AIDS. As a choreographer, I am negotiating the essence of their artwork from the perspective of contemporary dance. This Gentle Moment is a homage to Meir Eshel Absalon’s work Proposal for a Habitat. We built and inhabited spaces in which we ask for the relationship between queer (social) bodies and places to experiment with isolation and its resonance. (Nitsan Margaliot)

This Gentle Moment is supported by the NATIONAL PERFORMANCE NETWORK – STEPPING OUT, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the framework of the initiative NEUSTART KULTUR. Assistance Program for Dance.

Army of Lovefuckers

We will kill you with a fucking piece of performance art

We are arming ourselves – internally and externally. Theater is our boot camp.

Packing explosives, puppets and projections, we set off down the path of the female warrior.

We envisage performance as a continuation of politics with adapted techniques and we are recruiting all female fighters who have gotten lost along the way: the time to rise up is now! Join the Army of Lovefuckers!

Lovefuckers are on a journey toward an effective yet bloodless technique for revolution that ties games, fantasy, reality and utopia together. The stage is a guerilla boot camp with futuristic elements where a female recruit is trained to join the Army of Lovefuckers by learning the pluralistic battle of becoming a societally aware performer. She demonstrates her fitness level, chooses role models, builds resilience and, over the course of specialized training, becomes intimately acquainted with her weapon: puppet theater. She discovers her personal puppet and enters into symbiosis with her. Unified as one, the puppet and the puppeteer voice their demands and follow the paths of their role models, such as the feministic cyborg theorist Donna Haraway or the Mexican freedom fighter Subcomandante Marcos, into a playful battle against repression.

Everyone in the audience is invited to join, provided they meet at least one of the recruitment criteria on the application form, which will be distributed before the performance.

A multimedia political show in between theater, dance, performance and puppet theater with ambivalence consciously factored in. The performance elaborates on warfare, the transformation of recruits into heartless killing machines, rebellion against social oppression and the presence of violence in the media. It is a piece that opposes the brutality of the world, thus combatting the paralyzing fears caused by ongoing and unending wars, the predominance of neoliberalism and global terrorism with irony and playfulness.

Or, to sum things up, it is a solo performance tackling serious themes using humorous means.

The Land of Milk(y) and Honey? Digital Edition

everything you ever wanted to know about being Israeli in berlin

but were afraid to ask…

Join us for a very special one-night-only experiment on December 1st at 8pm Berlin time for a completely digital adaptation of The Land of Milk(y) and Honey?: Israelis in Berlin.

Thanks to a generous grant from Fonds Darstellende Künste, we are reenvisioning our intimate dinner party performance as a Zoom conference to be enjoyed from the comfort of your living room. Bring your dancing shoes, a container of pudding and your curiosity with you; this is not TV theater; our intrepid performers will join us from three different countries, connected via the world wide web. Interaction is possible but never imposed.

The performance text was created from transcripts of interviews with 60 Israelis in Berlin – Jewish, Muslim, Arab, secular, straight, queer, those that eschew all labels and everything in between.

To fully participate in this performance, all audience members are asked to bring a single-serving container of pudding, one whole lemon, freshly ground pepper and four fresh mint leaves.

“I pity those who no longer remember the Holocaust and abandon Israel for a pudding.”

This statement, made by Yair Shamir, then Israeli Minister of Agriculture, to the Jerusalem Post in October of 2014, marked the climax of the so-called “Milky protest”. In a post that launched a thousand ships, the Facebook page Olim L’Berlin (Aliyah to Berlin) urged Israelis to move to Berlin due to a markedly cheaper cost of living. The primary evidence? Aldi’s Dessertcreme & Sahne, a dessert comparable to Milky, the dominant pudding brand in Israel, sold for less than a third of the price. This Facebook post received more than one million likes within four days and created headlines around the globe.

Nearly 75 years after the end of the Second World War, Berlin’s Israeli community is estimated to number in the tens of thousands and impossible to verify due to issues of multiple citizenship. Is Berlin truly this promised land of milk and honey?  Are people from Israel really immigrating here only because of the standard of living, nightlife and Berlin’s fabled cultural reputation? What about those Israelis who leave the country due to the current political climate? And what affects do 20th century history as well as multiple reports of rising antisemitism have on emigration from Israel to Germany?

Three Israeli performers explore these questions using verbatim text from 60 interviews with the widest possible spectrum of partners; Israelis with an active religious background, Israeli Arabs, highly politicized Israelis as well as Israelis who have absolutely no interest in politics.

The ID Festival is funded by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Szloma-Albam Foundation and KIgA e.V. – Kreuzberger Initiative gegen Antisemitismus



Funding for Translation in Theater

Panel Discussion

“International, cultural dialogue, looking beyond your own backyard” – many theaters use catchphrases like this to market their seasons. But in order to present foreign-language plays on German stages, these first need to be translated.

Audiences in the theaters of large cities are becoming increasingly international. Many theaters now plan foreign-language surtitling (often English) from the beginning to make theater accessible for as many people as possible. For these surtitles too, texts need to be translated competently from the German.

Unfortunately, neither the theaters nor the publishers have enough money in their budgets to pay for this adequately. Theaters are being forced to resort to tougher and tougher savings strategies, and things will no doubt get harder due to Covid-19. Theater publishers are struggling to survive and international plays are often not even taken into the publisher’s catalogue, since the higher costs associated with them due to uncertain royalty returns most likely cannot be covered.

We will provide an overview of different funding models and programs, discuss how these programs can be designed with the guests, and analyze how theater translation can be communicated to and represented in the funding bodies. Can the current funding models meet the actual needs of theater translators? Are there different approaches in other countries? How can we think about new models? What about cooperative projects? How can requirements be communicated? We want to inspire new ideas and create synergies, and put the main focus on the needs of the theater translators.

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.

Before the event gets underway, we would like to ask you to participate anonymously in our survey (in German) on the topic of support of theater translation – please do so by October 24 via this link.