Featuring a post-performance discussion as part of Theater Scoutings Berlin!
After enchanting our audience as a support act in April 2014, we’re delighted to invite Janine and her band back to ETB | IPAC for a full concert!
by Lydia Stryk
How can peace ever be out of fashion?
The pacifists have been silenced by ISIS on the march, images of beheadings. But there have always been those fighting for peace, in their tiny cells, scattered across democracies around the world. Even when military aggression seems to be the popular answer to the ills of the world, they carry on believing in an alternative reality.
Peace, a very dark comedy by Lydia Stryk, is set in the meeting room of a peace group at the dawn of the Drone Wars. The play asks what exactly is peace? Can it be willed into existence? In ourselves? With those closest to us, let alone, in the world?
“As the Iraq war escalated, I began receiving almost daily emails from a peace group in a sizeable college town. I was struck by the group’s impassioned steadfastness and the enormous commitment of time and energy their constant activities implied. They never let up (and still haven’t). I began to wonder how they carried on, not giving in to despair or cynicism. I had the feeling I might write about a group like them one day, to cheer myself up, to inspire, let’s say, hope. That day came one summer, over a decade into the demoralizing war on terror. But the way the play evolved surprised me. These were not necessarily the characters I had in mind! This was not the way the story should unfold! The peace group battling inside me had taken on its own life. But the play is dedicated, with thanks, to those who go on, regardless of the odds, for the sake of peace.” – Lydia Stryk
With the scenic presentation of Peace we continue our collaboration with Berlin-based U.S. playwright Lydia Stryk.
Lydia Stryk was born in DeKalb, Illinois, birthplace of barbed wire and is now based in Berlin. She is the author of over a dozen full-length plays including Monte Carlo, The House of Lily, The Glamour House, American Tet and An Accident, which have been part of festivals around the United States and produced at, among others, Denver Center Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre (Chicago), Victory Gardens (Chicago), 7 Stages Theater (Atlanta), The Contemporary American Theatre Festival (Sheperdstown, West Virginia), Magic Theatre (San Francisco), and in Germany at Schauspiel Essen, Theaterhaus Stuttgart and English Theatre Berlin and featured at Biennale Bonn. Lydia Stryk´s plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing and Dramatists Play Service and translated into German by Per Lauke Verlag, Hamburg. She has been commissioned by Pittsburgh Public Theatre and Geva Theatre, Rochester and is the recipient of a Berrilla Kerr Playwright Award and the 2010 Rella Lossy Playwriting Award.
English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center produced Lydia Stryk´s American Tet in November 2008 and the world premiere of her play Lady Lay in 2011/12.
Headshot photo: Nancy Barnicle
Featuring headliner David Deery (USA), musical guest A Spoonful of Deutschland (USA/Ireland/Germany), stand-up comedy by Carmen Chraim (Lebanon) and improv comedy by Good Luck, Barbara (Canada/USA), curated by Paul Salamone (USA) and hosted by Josh Telson (USA)
A Berlin-based all-star lineup featuring stand-up comedy by Caroline Clifford (UK) and Daniel Louis Vezza (USA), musical comedy by Sticky Biscuits (Berlin) and improv comedy by ComedySportz Berlin, hosted by Stefan Danziger (Germany) and curated by Paul Salamone (USA)
At the heart of the project The City Ghettos of Today is a desire to redefine and reexamine the concept “ghetto” in the context of today’s closed migrant districts. Through artistic creation and sociological research, we aim to create a space in which to examine and discuss the multiple stories emanating from Europe’s migrant “ghettos”. How do we talk about “ghettos” today? Is it possible – and even necessary – to redefine the word in a manner that more accurately reflects the multiple realities that constitute our contemporary urban landscapes? What role do “ghettos” play in constructing a European identity? What factors contribute to phenomena of “ghettoization” in contemporary Europe? What are the dynamics that contribute to the implantation of migrant communities throughout Europe today and how do they connect to the collective memory of Europe’s past?
The City Ghettos of Today entails a series of workshops open to local communities in different European cities – Warsaw, Paris, Bologna, Milan, Helsinki, Berlin and Antwerp. Run by artists and cultural actors, each workshop installment will conclude with an art installation and public debate on the project’s themes in each of the cities listed above. This European collaboration will conclude in Warsaw in December 2014 with a large-scale installation-performance and debate that will bring together materials culled from each of the participating city workshops. The project unites artists, cultural actors, academics and social workers in order to explore the broad themes of “ghetto” and “migration districts” in participating European cities. The City Ghettos of Today reflects the interdisciplinary dimension of the Strefa WolnoSlowa foundation, which combines academic and theoretical methodologies with practices of artistic and cultural creation. Through artistic reflection and intellectual research, this collaborative project seeks to unravel the complex and problematical theme of “migrant ghettos” in contemporary Europe, paying particular attention to various definitions and visions of ghettos within the contexts of Warsaw, Paris, Bologna, Milan, Helsinki, Berlin and Antwerp.
The City Ghettos of Today in Berlin: Uninhabited Island
November 4 – 13, 2014
Uninhabited Island situates The City Ghettos of Today in the Berlin site-specific context of a rapidly changing city, from the “Cinderella” of European capitals back in the 1990s to the present “place to be”. The focus will be placed on the urban and social changes which are currently affecting the city, such as gentrification and the resulting displacement of low-income inhabitants, often including those with a “migration background”. Former immigrant and poor districts often associated with the idea of “ghetto”, like Kreuzberg or Neukölln, have received unprecedented hype and developed into magnets for tourists and real estate investors during the last five years.
Over the course of this, these districts, once the furthest limits of West Berlin and now central districts in the reunified German capital, have been increasingly populated by a new wave of immigrants. These newcomers, primarily from comparatively rich Western countries, active in the creative industries and often using English, not German, as a working language stand in stark contrast both to the pre-war German residents of Kreuzberg and Neukölln as well as the first wave of post-war immigrants, coming primarily from Turkey through a guest worker program established by West Berlin.
How do these distinct groups see themselves today? How do they see each other? Can they even communicate? 25 years after the Fall of the Wall, Berlin is still an island. An island full of existing inhabitants and constantly arriving new inhabitants. An island whose international glamorization and hyping in recent years have radically transformed living conditions in these previously impoverished, primarily migrant districts in the form of unsustainably increasing rental costs. An island that everyone wants to obtain or defend a piece of. The “struggle” for the island will be examined with representatives from these various groups through laboratories and workshops.
The Berlin-based part of the project is organized in cooperation with English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center, OnElf Theater and Performance Collective, European Alternatives and Tanz der Kulturen e.V.
Beginning on November 4, the international artistic team of The City Ghettos of Today from Poland, Italy, Finland and France together with the local partners English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts and OnElf Theater and Performance Collective will invite an heterogeneous group of participants based in Berlin, old and new Berliners, from Germany and from beyond, to work and reflect on the changing living and social conditions in the city. Starting from the stories and biography of the participants as a representative “sample” of contemporary Berliners and in a provocative relation with one another, a collective, controversial and complex portrait of the city will be created and strategies and desires for a common future will be rehearsed.
The results of this collective undertaking will be presented on Thursday, November 13 at 8:00 pm at English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center.
Workshops will be led an artistic project team consisting of: Pietro Floridia (Cantieri Meticci, Bologna), Alicja Borkowska (Strefa WolnoSłowa, Warsaw), Daniel Brunet (English Theatre Berlin | IPAC), Elena Basteri, Christian, Willhelm and Johannes Kup (OnElf Theatre and Performance Collective), Mehmet Ballikaya (Tanz der Kulturen), Linda Fahssis (Cie Check Points, Paris), Tomasz Gromadka (Strefa WolnoSłowa, Warsaw), Piotr Mikuć (Strefa WolnoSłowa, Warsaw), Marek Płuciennik (Ptarmigan, Helsinki), Alejandro Olarte (University of Arts of Helsinki – Center for Music and Technology)
When: November 8, 2014, 4:30 pm
Where: English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center, Fidicinstr. 40, 10965, Berlin
Moderated by sociologist Baris Ulker of Technical University Berlin, Center for Metropolitan Studies, artists, activists and academics will discuss Berlin, gentrification, social and urban change as well as the role of the artist as both catalyst of gentrification and as producer of alternative spaces and counter narratives of the urban and social environment.
Participants: Baris Ülker (Technische Universität Berlin, Center for Metropolitan Studies), Elena Basteri (Onelf Theater and Performance Collective Berlin), Renata Włoch (Sociology Institute of Warsaw University), Daniel Brunet (English Theatre Berlin | IPAC), copy & waste, Michelle Teran, Helga Dressel (Co-curator of the project Haus der 28. Türen),
When: November 13, 2014, 8:00 pm
Where: English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center, Fidicinstr. 40, 10965, Berlin
Admission to all events is free of charge.
This project is financially supported by the European Commission – Program Europe for Citizens and co-financed by the Evens Foundation
Chris Kriegstein is a man on the move, with a global career that catapults his family across North America, Europe, and Asia. For his wife, Elise, the hardship of chronic relocation is soothed by the allure of reinvention. Over the years, Elise shape-shifts: once a secretive Southern Baptist, she finds herself becoming a seasoned expat in Shanghai, an unapologetic adulterer in Thailand, and, finally, a renowned interior decorator in Madison. But it’s the Kriegstein daughters, Leah and Sophie, who face the most tumult. Fiercely protective of each other–but also fiercely competitive–the two sisters long for stability in an ever-changing environment. With each new move, the girls find they can count on only one thing: the consoling, confounding presence of each other. When the family suffers an unimaginable loss, they can’t help but wonder: Was it meant to be, or did one decision change their lives forever? And what does it mean when home is everywhere and nowhere at the same time? With humor and heart, Brittani Sonnenberg chases this wildly loveable family through the excitement and anguish of their adventures around the world.
Step right up and place your bid for a piece of Kreuzberg! Take part in an auction of the exotic! Enjoy the unbelievable feeling of not having to worry about anybody else!
It’s not great living in the 21st century: people have been protesting the rapidly rising rents for years at Kottbusser Tor in Kreuzberg. copy & waste will send the audience there for an audio walk – and right into a distribution conflict zone for living space, money and love. Under the headphones you’ll hear just what it sounds like – the divvying up of the loot.
While people from the East and West celebrated euphorically in 1989, one system began to swallow the other whole. The masters of global capital let their riches grow while the rest could only look on. Game of Zones: Property, cooperatives and biographies were offered up for the hunt, bagged and tagged.
But who wins when society erodes like this? Who were and are the big winners and losers of the distribution? And what happens to us when what is being divvied up is increasingly privatized, when we only want to own a thing or a person to earn profit from them?
It’s time to vehemently deny the claim that there hasn’t been a war here in seventy years. copy & waste will acoustically stage the big final battle: swords, war horses and dragons – all weapons are allowed in this civil war called privatization. After all, it’s already spread to remote parts of the city and into the body of each individual.
Featuring a short introduction and post-performance discussion on November 29 as part of Theater Scoutings Berlin!
Watch the trailer here:
You are currently viewing a placeholder content from YouTube. To access the actual content, click the button below. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.
More Informationcopy & waste is a performance collective based in Berlin. Founded in 2007 by Jörg Albrecht (writer) and Steffen Klewar (director and actor), copy & waste have been creating trans-media theater pieces and performances since then, always dealing with the changing cityscapes of the 21st century, with the blurring boundaries between fact and fiction. The team – while adjusting its line-up to every project – consists of actors, video artists, musicians/sound designers, stage designers, dramaturgs and workers from other disciplines.
The concept of analyzing power in urban spaces by performative means has led to different ways of working and aesthetic forms.
One of copy & waste’s approaches is to work in the black box in order to mirror rules of urban life in a highly concentrated form in the space of the theater; after their first work Wir Kinder vom Hauptbahnhof (Lehrer Bahnhof) in 2007 (100° Festival, Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, Schauspiel Frankfurt), they developed, among others, Berlin Ernstreuterplatz (2009, Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, uniT Graz), Orlac Hand Out (2010, uniT Graz, Ringlokschuppen Ruhr), Die blauen Augen von Terence Hill (2011, Hebbel am Ufer, Steirischer Herbst, Theaterhaus Jena) and Einsatz hinter der V.ierten Wand (Ringlokschuppen Ruhr 2013). In 2013, they also staged Barbarellapark, a musical about mobility in neoliberal times (Ringlokschuppen Ruhr, Theater Oberhausen).
In other productions, the group enters spaces already used by others and challenges their reality with artificial means. Accordingly, in 2008, copy & waste worked on Gropiopolis about the construction of Gropiusstadt for X Wohnungen Neukölln of HAU, in 2009, they produced Die Versteigerung von No. 36 in Kreuzberg’s West Germany about living in the past, present and future, and in 2010, they came up with WASTELER 1 & 2 for an architectural project working with prefabricated buildings and for a festival at Theater Chemnitz. For the festival Männer in Garagen of Sophiensäle Berlin (2014), copy & waste recruited the audience as members of their fictional boxing club (Rocky Cabinet).
From 2012 on, the group has also produced pieces that try to rethink the form of the audio play as a spatial medium: for the Dortmund-based theater festival FAVORITEN 2012, copy & waste created Cheap Throat, a site-specific performance speaking about a connection between pornography and city marketing. Following up in 2013 was Enid Blytons Geheimnis um den unsichtbaren Reichtum einer Gesellschaft, die nur sich will, an audio installation with one actor and a dog. In late 2014, copy & waste present a performative audio walk called Nasty Peace at Kottbusser Tor in Berlin-Kreuzberg, addressing the topics of rising rents and privatization of public housing since 1989, in cooperation with English Theatre Berlin | International Center for Performing Arts and NOrth Europe/WestGermany.
Beside their performative work, copy & waste have produced the web soap Andy Girls (2009) and, as a belated movie version of the series: ANDY GIRLS – Alles, was wir über Theater wissen, lernten wir vom Porno (2013, created for the project ThAEtermaschine of Interrobang, Sophiensäle Berlin).
From 2012 to 2014 copy & waste and Ringlokschuppen Ruhr initiated a major try-out of how to produce site-specific theater in a shrinking region (the Ruhr area). This cooperation was funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation in its program Doppelpass, meant to promote collaboration between performance groups and theaters. In this period, four pieces by copy & waste premiered at Ringlokschuppen Ruhr. As a final, they both staged, supported by Urbane Künste Ruhr and Theater Oberhausen, a project called 54. Stadt, a theatrical tour with four performance groups (kainkollektiv, Invisible Playground, LIGNA, copy & waste); beside staging their production Anarchie in Ruhrstadt, copy & waste were also responsible for creating the setting for the whole event.
From 2014 to 2016, copy & waste are funded by Fonds Darstellende Künste, in 2015 and 2016 additionally by Berlin’s Senate. In this period, the group will stage three productions about the abolition of public spaces (PUBLIC SHOWDOWN), starting with Nasty Peace.
A production by copy & waste in co-production with English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center and WestGermany/NOrth Europe as part of the ETB | IPAC project 25 Jahre Mauerfall or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ossis/Wessis.
In cooperation with Kotti & Co, PirataPatata und Comebackpackers.
Funded by Regierender Bürgermeister von Berlin – Senatskanzlei – Kulturelle Angelegenheiten and Konzeptionsförderung des Fonds Darstellende Künste e.V. – aus Mitteln des Bundes-
Featuring headliner Jack Woodhead (UK), standup comedy by Amelia Jane Hunter (Australia) and improv comedy by Good Luck, Barbara (Canada/USA), hosted by Drew Portnoy (USA) and curated by Paul Salamone (USA)
In her one-woman show Celebrity Bound, writer-director Catherine Duquette grapples with the polarities of celebrity and commonness, investigating her own relationship to fame and the personas that influence it. We admire celebrities for daring us to believe that anyone can achieve success, fame and fortune, yet we condemn them for seemingly having it all and for leading glamorous lifestyles that are well beyond our reach.
What are the forces behind celebrity? What drives the cultural phenomenon to simultaneously build and destroy the “Beautiful People”? How does celebrity negotiate the tension between access and excess? Through movement, language, video, scripted and improvised material, as well as audience interaction, Catherine moves fluidly between celebrity and fan, fantasy and reality, confronting her own desire for and repulsion towards becoming celebrity.
Original concept devised in collaboration with Michael Burditt Norton.
Watch the trailer here:
You are currently viewing a placeholder content from Vimeo. To access the actual content, click the button below. Please note that doing so will share data with third-party providers.
More InformationIn a time dominated by social media, rapid data consumption and curated identities, Berlin-based performer and writer Catherine Duquette strives for closeness and connection. She specializes in audience-performer relationships, movement and improvisational scores. Her performances exact moments of heightened awareness and honesty on stage in an effort to dissolve the barriers that shape how we perceive and (dis)connect with the world around us. Her solo work has been supported by MOMENTUM Berlin, English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center, a Fulbright Fellowship in Spain, the International Festival of the Delphic Games in Greece and the Subterranean Art House in Berkeley, California. Catherine studied theater at Arizona State University and the British American Drama Academy in Oxford, England. She earned her master’s degree in Performance Studies from New York University prior to relocating to Germany. Despite frequent moves, Catherine calls the Sonoran Desert of Arizona home.
Featuring a short introduction and post-performance discussion on October 22 as part of Theater Scoutings Berlin!