Blog Archive

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

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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.

Multilingualism in Theater

A Panel Discussion and Reading

Our society is a postmigrant society. It has changed again and again due to countless waves of migration, has become richer and more diverse as a result and is shaped by the coexistence of lots of languages and language regions that mutually influence each other.

How is this situation reflected in today’s theater? The German theater is the child of nationalism. But for a while now, the narrative of the national theater is being rewritten. Are multilingual productions a possible answer to our postnational social reality? For what purpose are multiple languages used and what effect do they have? How are multilingual plays written? And how are they translated?

At our evening event, we will talk to theater-makers who are creating new and groundbreaking models of multilingualism for the stage, and read from multilingual plays. In the workshop we will talk to writers and translators working in multiple languages, analyze linguistic aspects of the topic and discuss the texts with the selected participants.

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.

Nassim

Please note that this is a 2G event. All guests must present proof of vaccination against or recovery from COVID-19. People who cannot be vaccinated due to medical reasons may also attend if they have a negative PCR test and a letter from their doctor. As all guests must be vaccinated or recovered, we will not require social distancing or masks at this performance.

“Dear performer. I want to show you something. Did you know in Farsi my name is written like this: ‘.ROUPNAMIELOS MISSAN si eman yM’ ? Did you know ‘Nassim’ means ‘breeze’ in Farsi?”

From Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour comes an audacious theatrical experiment: each night a different performer joins the playwright on stage while the script waits unseen in a sealed box.

Touchingly autobiographical yet powerfully universal, NASSIM is a striking theatrical demonstration of how language can both divide and unite us. NASSIM is toured globally and is translated and performed in the native language of each country.

NASSIM won the Fringe First Award at the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and was subsequnetly performed in 20 countries within a 200-day span. In 2019, NASSIM landed in New York City for its American premier and an Off Broadway Run where the show won the Off Broadway Alliance Award for Best Unique Theatrical Experience. The five-month New York City Center run with over 150 renowned actors, writers, and creators included Michael Shannon, Tracy Letts, Kate Arrington, Carrie Coon, Lisa Emery, Cory Michael Smith, Kathy Najimy, Michael Urie, Phillipa Soo and many other theater, TV and movie stars.

And now, after around 400 performances, and following a long rest due to the global pandemic, NASSIM is back on the road starting with a two-night-only limited run in its hometown, Berlin.

Boris Aljinović was born in West Berlin in 1967. Even before he graduated from high school, he was discovered as an actor by the later co-founders of the ETB. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he attended the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst `Ernst Busch´ Berlin, and from there his path led him to the Renaissance Theater, to dwarf films and crime scenes. From 2001 to 2014, he was Kriminalhauptkommissar Felix Stark in the German TV series, “Tatort”. Like a lucky penny, he keeps on turning up at ETB | IPAC every now and again…

Lucy Ellinson is an actor and collaborative theater maker from North Wales (UK). She also teaches, mentors and works within community projects and campaigns. Recent UK theater credits include TYPICAL GIRLS by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm (Clean Break Theatre/Sheffield Crucible); MACBETH (Royal Exchange Manchester); TOP GIRLS by Caryl Churchill (National Theatre), THE RESISTABLE RISE OF ARTURO UI / BertoltBrecht (Donmar Warehouse); A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM (Royal Shakespeare Company/RSC). In Berlin, Lucy enjoys a long-term collaboration with Lydia Ziemke and Suite42, working on Dea Loher’s LAND WITHOUT WORDS (English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center) and WAR ZONE; research and development for HUSSEIN (Zoukak Theater, Beirut), ABOUT FRANCOIS (El Hakawati, Palestine) and the international digital project: THE SUN SETS EIGHT TIMES A DAY. Her own work is political and participatory, with a focus on community, austerity and protest: #TORYCORE (with Steve Lawson and Chris Thorpe) KAIDAN, ONE MINUTE MANIFESTO and WHEN I WAS OLD/ WHEN I GET YOUNG (recreated for the 2018 Expo Festival at ETB | IPAC).Lucy is a mentor and associate with the UK’s National Student Drama Festival and in Education Associate with The RSC and in recent years worked as an Associate Artist with London’s Gate Theatre, experimental performance collective Forest Fringe, Third Angel and The Deaf and hearing Ensemble (a collective of Deaf and hearing actors making formally experimental performance).

We´re looking forward to welcoming both Lucy and Boris back on our stage.

NASSIM follows Soleimanpour’s globally acclaimed White Rabbit Red Rabbit, which has been translated into over 25 different languages and performed over 1,000 times by names including Sinead Cusack, Ken Loach and Whoopi Goldberg including five performances at English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center in October 2013.

“A strikingly gentle, humane and emotive consideration of the experience of an artist living and working in the diaspora.” | The Herald

“Emotionally charged theatrical experiment.” | The Stage

“An unusually vivid celebration of theatre’s liveness.” | The Guardian

“As he heightens the audience’s sense of complicity in his art, Soleimanpour makes a quietly persuasive case for theatre’s special power to foster empathy.” | London Evening Standard

Nassim Soleimanpour (playwright and performer) is an independent multidisciplinary theater maker best known for his multi award-winning play White Rabbit Red Rabbit. Nassim’s play Blank premiered in the UK at the Bush Theatre’s RADAR festival in 2015, also playing in Amsterdam and Utrecht with further performances all over the world including at the Edinburgh Fringe and in Argentina, Australia and India. Further plays include Blind Hamlet which premiered at LIFT Festival 2014 prior to a UK tour and productions in Bucharest and Copenhagen. Nassim now lives in Berlin and has been commissioned to write a new play for Teater Momentum (Denmark).

Pics: David Monteith-Hodge / Studio Doug

Ladee Hubbard

U.S. EMBASSY LITERATURE SERIES – A Reading from The Rib King with Ladee Hubbard, Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow in Fiction, American Academy in Berlin, Fall 2021

Moderated by Anne Potjans, Department of English and American Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

For fifteen years August Sitwell has worked for the Barclays, a well-to-do white family who plucked him from an orphan asylum and gave him a job. The groundskeeper is part of the household’s all-black staff, along with “Miss Mamie,” the talented cook, pretty new maid Jennie Williams, and three young kitchen apprentices—the latest orphan boys Mr. Barclay has taken in to “civilize” boys like August.

But the Barclays fortunes have fallen, and their money is almost gone. When a prospective business associate proposes selling Miss Mamie’s delicious rib sauce to local markets under the brand name “The Rib King”—using a caricature of a wildly grinning August on the label—Mr. Barclay, desperate for cash, agrees. Yet neither Miss Mamie nor August will see a dime. Humiliated, August grows increasingly distraught, his anger building to a rage that explodes in shocking tragedy.

Ladee Hubbard is an award-winning New Orleans-based writer of literary fiction and the author of The Talented Ribkins (Melville House, 2017), which received the 2018 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and Hurston-Wright Foundation Legacy Award for Debut Fiction. Hubbard completed her BA at Princeton University, MFA in dramatic writing at New York University, PhD in World Arts and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles, and MFA in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has taught in the Africana and African Diaspora Studies department at Tulane University. Recent and forthcoming publications include the novel The Rib King (Amistad/Harper Collins, 2021) and short-story collection The Blinking What (Amistad/Harper Collins, 2022). Hubbard’s writing has appeared in Guernica, The Times Literary Supplement, Arkansas International, Copper Nickel, and Callaloo, among others. Her work has been supported by the Camargo Foundation, Djerassi Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, Sewanee Writers Conference, and the William Faulkner-William Wisdom award for the short-story category.

Where Are The Animals?

All the clubs were closed and the structures that protected us had vanished. ANALI GOLDBERG, the most celebrated divine techno goddess in Berlin’s club scene was out of work and had to wear a mask.

With so much free time on her hands, ANALI GOLDBERG decided to start a new QUEER NARRATIVE REVOLUTION (since the old one sucked)!!!

As part of a new trilogy, WHERE ARE THE ANIMALS is an outrageous musical evening of queer oral history. Using highly original and creative storytelling, ANALI GOLDBERG blurs the line between fictitious genealogy and autobiographical comedy.

Join the infamous ANALI GOLDBERG and her entourage to feel closer to yourself!

In cooperation with the ID Festival and made possible through funds from Bezirksamt Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg

Fiasko

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” – Samuel Beckett.

Fiasko is a work-in-progress performance by the Latin American-European collective ABA NAIA as part of THE LAB, the new work development program of English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center. The collective invites the audience to a radicalized idea of failure that ties into contemporary conversations. It is a comical and humorous disruption of the expectations of theater. In Fiasko, the ambivalence and power relations of comedy are explicitly portrayed through performative failure.

The pandemic condemns us to failure at all ends, slows us down and makes us fall into despair. We have taken a close look at the miseries of our time and developed strategies of disrupting, sabotaging and corrupting the expected way of being on stage. All the way to the Grande Fiasko!

Fiasko started as a performative research funded by the 2021 #TakeCare program of Fonds Darstellende Künste.

Please note that tickets are extremely limited due to the current health and safety regulations. We encourage guests to secure their tickets as soon as possible.

To attend the performance, you must wear an FFP2 mask and present a negative antigen quick test for COVID-19 that is not older than 24 hours or proof of your complete vaccination or recovery from COVID-19. Please book a test date in advance from an official test center, e.g. www.test-to-go-berlin. Please observe our health and safety measures.

Zugang mit FFP2-Maske und aktuellem negativen Antigen-Schnelltest (nicht älter als 24 Stunden) oder Nachweis des vollständigen Impfschutzes bzw. der Genesung. Bitte buchen Sie vorab eigenständig Ihren verbindlichen Testtermin bei einem offiziellen Testzentrum, bspw. über www.test-to-go.berlin. Bitte beachten Sie unsere Hygiene- und Schutzmaßnahmen.