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 At the festival hotel I was introduced to a young unpublished playwright, who did not have a passport, because he had refused to do military service.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!
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.
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…
In February of 2020, English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center began a community theater project open to people of all ages. Our initial question was simple: if trees could talk, what would they say? This led us on a journey of collaboration, experimentation and contemplation. Together we walked in Tegel forest, shared memories of trees, delved into mythology and the news, discussed evolution with a scientist and observed the trees in Kreuzberg.
Sitting in a darkened movie theater, hunched up, limbs knotted, hands over faces, three friends wonder how it is that they happen to be seeing yet another horror movie together. It’s that fine, intriguing line between fear-horror-pleasure. This shared visceral experience also raises questions: what’s up with women in horror films? All those beautified helpless victims and sirens with dark powers. Who created them and through whose eyes are we watching? How do we connect, and to what, when these female archetypes bleed across the screen? An unlikely and frightening adventure ensues.