Productions | English Theatre Berlin

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MEME – I See Ah!

About the moment in which ANYthing becomes SOMEthing and again something ELSE.

When do we think as spectators that we understood something (I see. Ah!)? When does this kind of understanding manifests itself in a fixed notion, a clichéd image of the (yet still unknown) Other and its “traditional” performing arts? When does our gaze even claim the seen as general knowledge about the Other (Asia!)? What kind of gap exists between the seen (I see. Ah!) and the claimed (Asia!)?

This stream of questions came up when Hyunsin, initially trained in Western Contemporary Dance and Theater, started to learn Traditional Korean Dance, a dance form which builds a different body on stage than the Western counterpart she was familiar with.

Out of the Dark

A meditation on freedom, loss and grief

The artistic duo BirdMoon – Stephen Mooney and Dorothy Bird – invite artists Aude Gouaux Langlois, Nadine Milzner, Natasha Jaffe and Michael Haeflinger to join an artistic interdisciplinary and interactive “conversation” by means of music, dance, poetry, visuals and soundscape.

The performance piece Out of the Dark explores the desire to escape from darkness, both physical and mental, and its propensity to linger and echo into the light as repetition or distortion of memory. Within these loose parameters, the artists work to create clarity out of chaos, harmony out of passion and create light within the dark.

Lauta

A physical exploration of the hysterical joys and melancholia of youth

What adolescent events, personally and politically, shape the performance of gender as 20-somethings? At a young age, dance artists Aliina Lindroos and Susie Yugler were both called lautas (or ironing board, i.e., “she’s flat as a board [lauta]”).

LAUTA aims to understand how childhood heartbreak, trauma and loss echo in the body. The work investigates the female gaze and the implications of a feminized body in multiple modes of performance.

The Face Reality Deserves

A performance about memory or the lack of it

“Sometimes I feel this planet is nothing but a giant loop machine. Going ‘round and ‘round and around we go. And here we are, going ‘round, doing the same old stupid things, over and over again. In love, relationships, in politics, with our thoughts, with our beliefs, with fashion…”

#Manifesto

“My name is Heidi Blumenfeld and I’m a transnational artist.”

She breaks borders between kitsch and high art, between funny and serious, between masculine and feminine. Her art is her juggling. But how to
make art? How to be an artist in a time when everyone wants to be an artist?

A transdisciplinary performance which puts circus into a theatrical universe, the piece proposes an art manifesto for our era. And at the same time,
however ironic and witty it may be, #Manifesto is also a celebration of art (so that people don’t forget what it’s all about).

Intime Fremde

“When I was a child my mother used to tell me that I am a citizen of the world. Of course I believed her, she was my mother. But the older I got, the more I understood that this was just my mother’s dream.”

This performance by Welcome Project. The Foreigner’s Theatre is dedicated to a reflection on the idea of borders, identity, the concept of nation, and country of origin. The European Union got us used to low-cost travel and making ourselves at home in every country of the EU. Now, the old world is running scared and putting itself on lockdown: the Mediterranean Sea now seems to be made out of barbed wire. Borders exist hidden in plain sight everywhere.

A Dinner of Shadows: The Politics of Being

A dance theater performance which deconstructs our cultural norms of behavior, revealing suppressed aspects of both the individual and collective shadows

The two performers/choreographers investigate how the relentless drive towards consumption, getting, needing and exploiting of the contemporary Western world plays out in the attitudes and responses of the individual body and mind. In the process, they create a highly physical piece that is also culturally relevant.

Ringside in G Minor

A symphony of fight by EX-teater

Live music, storytelling and body percussion interweave to create a sound-based performance to be watched through the ears. It is inspired by Daniel Veronese’s dramatic poem Ringside, in which women brutally fight for the privilege of having a very unique prize. In the story, this year’s trophy is a bridegroom, the offspring of the union between a female sailor and a shark. From one round to another, the fight gets louder and fiercer, but the prize seems well worth the suffering.

Witnesses carefully follow the fight, blinded by the whiteness of the ring. They beg their children not the look at it, but the children can still listen. They listen to cruelty, they listen to stories.

Am I Dead Yet? (Chris Thorpe & Jon Spooner / Unlimited Theatre)

Death is no longer a moment. It is a process. A process that can be reversed.

Two friends, talking (and singing) about what happens when we die, how we think about dying, and most importantly, how some of us might be brought back.

Performed by Unlimited founding members Jon Spooner and Chris Thorpe, Am I Dead Yet? is filled with stories and songs about death and dying and about how we don’t talk about it enough.

This new show from Unlimited Theatre, one of the most renowned British theatre companies, is inspired by research into contemporary developments in resuscitation science and made in collaboration with emergency care professionals.

“Vibrantly theatrical and typically absorbing” **** Independent

“Chris Thorpe and Jon Spooner’s electric view on the dying process will rewrite your expectations for your final end” **** The Stage

“An enjoyable, poignant cabaret piece about death in the distant and all-too-near future” The Guardian

We are very excited to welcome Chris Thorpe back to English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center following our work together on his scintillating solo performance, Confirmation, as part of Theatertreffen / Stückemarkt Revisited 2015.

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Jon Spooner is a director, writer, performer, founder member and the artistic director of Unlimited. He has directed and performed in numerous Unlimited shows, including Fringe First winners Static (invited to English Theatre Berlin in 2002) Neutrino, Safety by Chris Thorpe (with the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield) and Zero Degrees & Drifting. Jon also co-writes and directs the annual Christmas show for the BBC’s CBeebies channel filmed live at a major UK theatre and then broadcast on CBeebies and BBC One.

Chris Thorpe is a founder member and a core artist with Unlimited, and also an artistic associate of Third Angel. As a solo performer, he is making a cycle of solo pieces called Eating Wasps and continues to collaborate with companies like Slung Low, RashDash and Soup Collective, with whom he wrote and recorded the piece The Bomb On Mutannabbi Street Is Still Exploding, which has been permanently installed at the Imperial War Museum North. Chris has won Fringe First Awards in 2011 (for The Oh Fuck Moment with Hannah Jane Walker) and 2014 for Confirmation. His durational theatrical experience, The Milk of Human Kindness was at the Royal Court in London in 2016. He recently wrote Chorus for The Iphegenia Quartet at the Gate Theatre, as well as a new piece, Victory Condition, for the Royal Court which will open in September 2017.

Director Amy Hodge’s credits include The Ethics of Progress for Unlimited Theatre, Our Big Land (Romany Theatre Company), The Rover (Hampton Court Palace), Romeo and Juliet (Theatre Uz, Uzbekistan for the British Council). She was Associate Director at Sherman Cymru from 2008 to 2011 and has also directed shows at the Tricycle, Young Vic, Orange Tree Theatre and West Yorkshire Playhouse. Amy was Studio Associate at the National Theatre (2013-14) and was the recipient of the 2007 Jerwood Directors Award.

Adam Johnson

the U.S. Embassy Literature Series

Adam Johnson, currently the Holtzbrinck Fellow in Fiction at the American Academy in Berlin, reads from Fortune Smiles and work-in-progress.

Adam Johnson is the Phil and Penny Knight Professor in Creative Writing at Stanford University. Winner of a Whiting Award and Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy in Berlin, he is the author of several books, including Fortune Smiles, which won the 2015 National Book Award, and the novel The Orphan Master’s Son, which was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, GQ, Playboy, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, Tin House and The Best American Short Stories. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. Adam Johnson is currently the Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

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