Productions | English Theatre Berlin

Blog Archive

L’ART ET LA MANIÈRE and PLANTING MEMORIES

Two dance theater performances

L’art et la manière explores the relationship between everyday movements and artistic actions in an engaging, fun and critical way. Through this this interactive dialogue with the audience, Marie questions her identity as an interpreter, a woman and the role artists have in society.

Planting Memories is a dance duet that explores the concepts of personal space and identity. Drawing inspiration from their own lives, Marie and Paula relate personal memories through text and images. By plunging into a surreal world, this piece guides the audience through a personal journey in which the unfolding of the past enables the present.

Shlomo’s Friends

Every immigrant has to form new relationships.

So did Shlomo Lieberman when he came to Berlin.

In this performance, he invites new friends to present ancient texts related to his name twin, King Solomon. These texts deal with love, desire, decency, morality and posing disturbing questions about the meaning of life.

Friends are asked to choose from these texts, to perform them as they see fit and to offer a new understanding of them. The mission is to create a new emotional landscape on the background of an old one in which people can become friends.

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.