Productions | English Theatre Berlin

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HomeWork

When activists are forced to scatter and to connect through their mobile phones and laptops, who among them knows what is really going on? Who possesses the truth and do values change according to where they are? How do fear, imagination, ambition and lies shape the truth?

HomeWork is a play about activism versus corruption. It is about activists who never stop working, and corrupt people who never stop working as well. Every place becomes home. Activists want to change the political status of their homeland while brutal authorities drive them to change. Corruption tries to find ways to survive these changes and benefit from them.

The play tells the story of a girl who is an activist. She is stuck alone in a city she does not really know and then she meets a corrupt man. She lies all the time and he believes her. He tells the truth all the time but she does not believe him.

How can choices be made?

Please note that tickets are extremely limited due to the current health and safety regulations. We encourage guests to purchase 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.

HomeWork is a production by Barzakh in cooperation with English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center, supported by: Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Program: NEW START CULTURE #TakeAction & Stiftung Preußische Seehandlung.

Cool Aid

a cover version of the greatest comedy ever

Katherine and Audrey rent out a garden apartment. Only to artists, though. This has earned them a very impressive art collection. They love art, galleries, openings. Their brother, who thinks he’s Erich Honecker, will probably have to go to an institution because he won’t leave his room anymore. He will be greatly missed, because he buries the corpses in the cellar when his sisters have poisoned another one of those sad characters – There is nothing sadder than failed artists.

Katherine: “It was so sad to see a young artist die. And then we came to the conclusion that there really is nothing sadder in this world than an artist who suffers from a lack of success, who goes nowhere with all their ambitions but down the drain”

Audrey: “And we thought it would be better they didn´t have to live through all that pain and misunderstanding and pain again. So we helped them.”

Then her nephew Max shows up with Dr. Graveline. They are on the run and have the body from their last murder with them in the trunk. The burial ground in the basement comes in handy. Things get complicated ….

Cool Aid is a lurid farce about the dangerous edges of the contemporary art business, where the abyss is always lurking and only those who “make it” are immune from the crash.

Audrey: The last sad batch of Minimalism.

Katherine: Imitators only.

Audrey: A bunch of fucking wankers.

Cool Aid is a contemporary cover version of the best of all comedies, Arsenic and Old Lace from 1941.

Islands

“Paradise is an island. So is hell.”

(Judith Schalansky, The Atlas of Remote Islands)

Sail away, sail away, sail away…is there anyone who hasn’t been dreaming of that for the last year and a half? Landing on a tropical island far from everyday cares, the news and possibly the pandemic? Inspired by several islands far away and close by, known and unknown, real and metaphorical, a crew of international artists invite the audience to join them on a journey to islands all over the world, from the middle of the deep blue sea to the four walls of our own homes.

Islands have always and continued to serve as the focus of deeply contradictory imaginations fueling both utopian fantasies as well as colonial and imperial greed. The multimedia performance Islands invites audiences to walk the fine line between them.

In Islands, a diverse ensemble of artists come together to share their biographies, marked by migration and exploration and thus full of island stories, with each other as well as the audience.

After the successful coproduction of Stuck in Orbit (2019), Islands is the second cooperation of Post Theater with English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center. Post Theater is a media-theater company that fuses research with the biographic background of their changing casts. Post Theater has worked in more than 20 countries around the world, also including a number of island nations.

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.

Murder at Brightshadow Manor

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 for you 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. Our guests must wear an FFP2 mask during their entire visit to the theater, including during the performance.

Please note that we are only able to offer 35 tickets for this performance.

Featuring a cast of nine eccentric characters (including an actual ghost) and inspired by the classic Edwardian farce, this brand new play has touches of Agatha Christie, the Addams Family and a hint of Tim Burton, too.

The Saviour

a new play by Irish playwright Deirdre Kinahan, produced by Landmark Productions, performed by Marie Mullen and Brendan Gleeson, directed by Louise Lowe and presented by the Cork Midsummer Festival.

The production will be streamed and available online from June 19th. Get more info and your tickets to join the stream here: The Saviour

The Saviour is a new play that charts the extraordinary shift in social, political and religious life in Ireland over the past thirty years. It asks questions about responsibility, about how we respond to trauma and about the tricky question of forgiveness.

Please join us for a special event:

In the Green Room with The Saviour | A Post Show Talk

June 22, 2021 – 19:00 CET

The Embassy of Ireland in Germany and the Consulate General of Ireland in Frankfurt are thrilled to present, in partnership with The English Theatre in Frankfurt, English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center, and The English Theatre of Hamburg, IN THE GREEN ROOM WITH THE SAVIOUR– a post-show talk with the team behind the brand new Irish play The Saviour.

For the first time ever, all of the English theaters in Germany are brought together in a partnership to present a theater piece to a nationwide English-speaking German audience. Utilizing the boundary-less nature of current pandemic-accommodating online activity, audiences can access the live premiere as part of Cork Midsummer Festival, and partake in this interactive Q+A to gain deeper insights into this highly anticipated play.

Moderated by journalist Meike Krüger, the acclaimed team of writer Deirdre Kinahan, director Louise Lowe, actor Marie Mullen and producer Anne Clarke will shed light on this exciting work that reflects deeply on cultural transformations in Ireland.

Join ‘In the Green Room with The Saviour’ on June 22 live on Zoom or from any of the partners’ Facebook pages. Register here to attend.

Let There Be Theater!

March 13, 2021 marks the one-year anniversary of the day theaters around the world went dark in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Our friends and collaborators Aurora Nova, the renowned international theater booking agency that represents the Berlin-based Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour, have invited us and hundreds of theaters around the world to mark this anniversary with a very special performance of Nassim’s very special play White Rabbit, Red Rabbit by our dear friend GAYLE TUFTS.

The profits of the evening will go to theatermakers who had no work during the Corona pandemic!

We’ll let Aurora Nova’s director, Wolfgang Hoffmann, tell you a little more about the play:

“Ten years ago, almost to the day, I performed in a show at the Fadjr Festival in Tehran. At the festival hotel I was introduced to a young unpublished playwright, who did not have a passport, because he had refused to do military service. In order to get his work in front of an audience, he had devised a play that had to be performed as a cold read, without the need of a director, set or rehearsals. All it needed was for a brave performer to agree to read a text in front of a live audience, without first knowing what the play was about. I liked this young man and loved his idea and spontaneously agreed to help produce his show at the Edinburgh Fringe later that year. When I finally saw the show performed live, I realized what this playwright had achieved. Through the power of his words alone he had written himself to freedom.

Now, ten years on, the play White Rabbit, Red Rabbit has become one of the most widely performed plays in the world. It has been translated into over 30 languages and been performed by some of the most respected actors in the business. The playwright, Nassim Soleimanpour now lives in Berlin and realizes that our world is trapped, much like he was ten years ago. So the idea was born to offer his play as a vehicle to connect and empower producers, artists and audiences around the world.”

In 2013, White Rabbit, Red Rabbit was our second production after our reimagining as an international performing arts center – and we are thrilled to be able to offer this incredible work once again as part of Aurora Nova’s Let There Be Theater!

This time, we’ve found an absolutely legendary performer to accompany Nassim’s text.

Gayle Tufts, “Germany’s best known US-American”. Working as an entertainer, author, singer and commentator, Gayle has been a household name in Germany’s theater landscape since the 1990s, when she also gave some of her very first performances at a little basement theater on Fidicinstraße called Friends of Italian Opera – which is now English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center.

On March 13, at 8pm, we will be offering a one-night only live stream of Gayle’s performance of White Rabbit, Red Rabbit. Tickets will cost 10 €.

We look forward to Zooming White Rabbit, Red Rabbit with Gayle, Aurora Nova and all of you!

Exotic Animal

Exotic Animal is an online audience collaborative performance that takes place via the platform Zoom.

“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.

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 theatre 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).

2020 EXP(L)O(RE) – Evening 2

A JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY
This format and is dedicated to newcomers, shorter performances and work-in-progress. This year, we are offering four performances over two evenings.

I AM EVERYBODY, I AM EVERY BODY | Performance (8:00 pm)

Written, Directed and Performed by Marque-Lin (USA) | Sound, Video and Stage Design by B_No_Source [live] (Germany) | Choreography by Ly Nguyen (Germany/Vietnam) | Costume Design by Jessika Strauck (USA/Germany/Paraguay)

I Am Everybody, I Am Every Body is an experimental performance and audio-visual piece that traces a fractured semiautobiography of MARQUE-Lin as a daughter of Vietnamese refugees. Using extractions from her life as footage and material, B_No_Source [live] will modulate and rearrange MARQUE-Lin’s voice live on stage, transforming her into <s*he> – a nation- less AI-produced female entity that has decided to finally investigate the systems and networks that have created her in search of her point of origin and subsequently her purpose in living an existence of such ambiguity and suffering.

Questions of nationhood, inter-generational inheritance, historical and personal trauma skip and glitch as <s*he> questions the pervasive sense of unrest and constant malfunctions happening in her body. Something is calling her from the edge of her self-understanding. From within the black box—a space where unknown codes and hidden layers categorize and determine – her identity emerges. Where does <s*he> begin? Which systems are complicit in the creation of immigrational identity? How much of our digital networks represent our own hidden prejudices? Is there an escape? PRESS START.

DDS! Discipline, Dominance, Submission | Interdisciplinary Performance (9:00 pm)

Direction and Dramaturgy by Derya Durmaz (Turkey/Germany) | Audiovisual Direction by Özlem Sariyildiz (Turkey/Germany) Performered by Derya Durmaz & Michael(a) Daoud (Syria/Germany) | Assistant Direction by Bora Yediel (Turkey/Germany) | Graphic Artwork by Turgut Kocaman (Turkey/Germany)

Pain and pleasure. Giving in and giving up. Playing and roleplaying. Do you play your part? Did you write your part? Or were you given your part? Was it consensual? Or were you conned? Was it at least sensual? Is it time to come to your senses? Maybe then you can finally make sense of it all…

DDS! Discipline, Dominance, Submission is an interdisciplinary performance project that takes a close and intimate look at how much of an understanding we really have of our (chosen or given) gender roles and the parts we play.

No One’s Coming, Everyone’s Going!

The (Non) Festival of the Summer in Berlin – Solidarity Festival for Independent Berlin-Based Artists and Culture Makers Facing Extreme Financial Hardship

Peaches is going, Sasha Waltz & Guests and cie. toula limnaios are going, Sharon Dodua Otoo is going, She She Pop are going, Kathrin Röggla is going and Berlin’s entire independent arts community is going – but none of them are coming.

On July 31, 2020, an enormous festival will take place in Berlin where a stunning amount of artists, ensembles and culture makers working in all fields will take part – by not showing up. During the coronavirus pandemic, attendance and physical presence can be deadly. And, exactly because of this, many freelance artists and culture makers in Berlin haven’t been able to earn money for months and can no longer pay rent or buy groceries.

This is why we’re turning to you: Show your solidarity! Buy a ticket for Berlin’s (non) festival of the year and don’t show up! By buying a ticket, you can help to ensure Berlin’s one-of-a-kind artistic and cultural landscape still exists after this crisis has passed. Please help us to collect as many donations as possible to provide real support (we intend to provide relief packages of € 1,000) to as many artists and culture makers as possible.

The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries

Did you hear? Our friends at SummerWorks in Toronto, Canada just announced their first summer presentation The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries: Summer Passport – a remote immersive experience from Outside the March!

We are thrilled to be partnering with SummerWorks and a community of organizations from around the world to spread the word that this special presentation is available internationally for the first time and entirely free to the public.

“Made-to-measure… executed so generously… [The Ministry] asked about my world, listened and then let me slip free of it, at 10-minute intervals.” -The New York Times

Finding yourself with a little time on your hands? Missing the uplift of live arts and culture? Is there a friend, a relative or a kid in your life who could use a daily dose of adventure? The meticulous mavericks at The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries have got you covered. This customized improvised narrative experience unfolds over a week’s worth of short daily phone calls, as our intrepid private investigators delve into your very own micro mystery using the investigative power of good conversation.

In Germany, Ministry agents will be available between 5pm-7pm / 9pm-11pm / 1am-3am. Tickets are going extremely quickly and can be booked, free of charge, at https://www.mundanemysteries.com/book-now-international

The Ministry’s Departments include:

· The Misplaced Keepsakes Division

· The Striking Coincidences ThinkTank

· The Missed Connections Unit

· The Paranormal Activity Task Force

At this moment of uncertainty, leave some of the pondering to the professionals as we work with you to untangle meaning from meaninglessness in the mundane.

There are only a limited number of appointments available for international investigations so be sure to book as soon as possible to get your daily dose of adventure during these unprecedented times!