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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.

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.

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!