etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center

The exceptional narration of the clown in this story is built upon Iranian traditional theater. It is also based on the storytelling fundamentals of Scheherazade and the 1001 Nights. Its combination with the techniques  and  tunes of contemporary performance and dance adds to its bitter humor.

MonoTalkhak (The Clown and I) is a story about an eternal clown who is wandering around with the last king of the world, and tries to make a living and afford the king’s dialysis by performing shows. As the clown says, the last king of the world is now aged and vulnerable, and his skin cannot be exposed to the sun. He sits on a wheelchair and is covered by a sheet so that the audience would not see him.  The clown narrates the story of his bizarre, weird, funny, sad life during the play.

You are invited to a special auction at the end of this show! Elixir of life!

Nima Dehghani is a multidisciplinary artist and theater director whose work explores the relation between society, politics and audience interactions in public spaces. Born in Tehran, Iran in 1986, he studied architecture and worked as an architect for seven years but his focus has shifted more to theater and social arts since 2009. Now he is a pursuing a Master of Fine Arts with an emphasis on performance and new media at Carnegie Mellon University in United States. Nima works predominantly in the medium of theater and performance art. He strives to find the most effective way to influence his audience and society through new experiences in experimental media. Nima has published three books and writes for numerous Iranian papers. he has won several prizes in playwriting and was named the best young Iranian director of the year in 2011. Underlying most of his works he tries to reflect political and social realities of his surrounding environment. More recently, Nima’s “Netformances” represent a new direction for his art, as he combines performance art with the Internet and social networks such as Facebook.

Alireza Keymanesh is an Iranian actor and dancer. He is a member of the 84 theater group and theInteractive Theatre Group which has branches both in Iran and the Netherlands. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in the field of acting from the Art University of Tehran. He has performed numerous roles in theater and film. He is also an acting teacher who train actors and actresses in his own methodology which involves the whole body and mind. In 2011 he won the second prize of for best theater actor of the  year in Iran for the play MonoTalkhak directed by Nima Dehghani, in the annual Iran’s theater ceremony. He then moved to Netherlands to carry out his practical research at ArtEZ University. His research was on the subject of “society’s influence on the human body”, and the similarity of this subject with the influence of Samuel Beckett’s scripts on the performer’s body. He has conducted this research by participating in the courses’ Dance, Choreography, and DAI (Dutch Art Institute) and he performed two  plays of Samuel Beckett as a presentation of his research at ArtEZ.

This show is a result of our intimate clash with starting from zero. As we moved to Berlin, we had to leave behind all that we have built in our home countries, all our professional and personal contacts. What a wonderful and horrible feeling: not to know and not to be known by anybody. Free and condemned to our empty living room and empty phone book, we had to concentrate on each other and ourselves. We felt an urge to create.

We play with Sławomir Mrożek’s drama The Emigrants to express our own stories, and we feel that the drama is playing with us to tell its own story. We play with each other, searching on stage for the moments of freedom – freedom to laugh at the way that we act in our daily lives. We play with the many languages that we are forced to use in our private little Babylon: Hungarian, Serbian, English, German – sometimes even Italian. We play with the fact that one just can’t understand everything that is said. We play with our two artistic fields – theater and video – and explore possible relationships between them.

Our show is a conflict between different realities – between the reality of the stage and the reality of the screen; between the reality of the play and the reality of our everyday life; between the “finished” reality of the art work and the never-ending reality of the audience. Through all this realities we chase the idea of freedom, although we are not sure if such a thing exists, and if it does, will we be able to recognize it when we catch it? Still, we are chasing it, while being constantly afraid that if you chase an idea for too long, you might become its slave. And what a tragicomic situation – being a prisoner of freedom.

Marija Maki Lipkovski was born in 1989 in Belgrade, Serbia, where she grew up and studied theater and radio directing at the University of Performing Arts. In Serbia, she was struggling for the re-birth of the Serbian Freie Szene by creating performances independent from established government or non-government organizations. She is especially interested in the relationship between stage and screen. Liokovski lives and works in Berlin.

Miklós Miki Barna was born in 1987 in Budapest, Hungary, is a Hungarian multimedia artist and journalist based in Berlin. He has a Master’s degree in television and documentary directing from the University of Film and Theater Arts of Budapest. In the recent years, he has primarily worked as a freelance journalist and filmmaker, always with a strong focus on theater. Having experience as an amateur actor, now he is experimenting with a mash-up of the various creative fields he is involved in.

ruin ultimately nourishes. 

right under noses.

ringing urgently rosies.

rocking ugly nicknames.

ruffling utter nonsense.

researching unacclaimed notes.

refreshing unity nonetheless. 

raising universal nostrils.

redefining untold nightmares.

ready. unlace. nail.

Nima Sene is a performance maker, singer, dancer and spoken word poet based in Glasgow. Her practice is routed in movement and in voice. She has been a member of the Tangente Company Berlin since 2006. Nima has performed several times at Inn Deep, a spoken word monthly event in Glasgow, and will be performing this year at Tedx Glasgow. Nima is also a collaborator and has co-devised as well as acted in several performances, including break it. with Leyla O’Reilly,  How To Be A Fuckin F*******! with Ama Josephine, Number by Colours written and directed by Drew Taylor, Plutonic Relations with Will Stringer,  SisGo participatory dance theater by SDT. She is also a new member of the Glasgow based Burlesque Group Femme Fatal. She has performed as a singer at open mic events and will be performing in her NO Fluff performative concert duo with Merlin Hayward at Mellow Moods festival Berlin 2014.

Will Stringer is an emerging performance maker, voice over artist and actor based in Glasgow. He is currently in his second year as a scholarship student on the BA (Hons.) Contemporary Performance Practice Programme at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Will has co-created and performed in a range of theater and live art performances. These performances include out of nothing but our matter by Aby Watson, How Silver the Screen Between Us, a durational performance by Amy Pickles, and Plutonic Relations created with Nima Sene.Will has recently embarked upon acting for screen by being a dancer for Dracula: Untold by Universal Studios, a dancer in The Fame of Us by Amy Pickles and Jordyana Ataman and was also the male lead in Mannequin by Louise Dawson.

Inspired by dreaming, fantastical lands, slideshows, hippies, stand-up comedy and the hope that together we can melt the hardness of reality.

A bridge/Abridged is a shared proposal to launch into the choreographic imagination-to squash our perceived limitations of a performing moment while remaining seated.

Maria Baroncea and Allison Peacock are both recent graduates of the UdK/HZT Berlin Solo/Dance/Authorship Master’s program. Baroncea was born in Bucharest and is currently based in Berlin. She is the manager of her own time, working on things that interest her in a mostly slow tempo. For the moment she owns the pseudonyms and the projects such as “The Bureau of Research and Manifestation of the Continuous Present, “Wear Text”, “Eio – One Hour Society”, A certain togetherness- tryouts to be synchronized.” Peacock is also based in Berlin, but originally from Toronto, Canada. Her performances, videos, installations and collaborative works have been shown in venues in Berlin, New York, Ottawa, Toronto and Whitehorse. Currently she is working on a series of self-published booklets of choreographic experiments.

Stamped is equally inspired by the chronology and events leading up to, during, and following the construction and fall of the Berlin Wall as it is with our own personal experiences as immigrants in Germany in a Post Wall world.

The moments of alienation, paranoia, exhaustion, feelings of belonging, and of not belonging are drawn from historical accounts, but also deeply drawn from our daily lives. In this exploration, our wall is a wall but it is also a boundary, a border, a social construct around us. It is a suggestion that we’re safer inside of it and that whatever is happening outside is inferior. It is a quiet, imposing power. It’s very presence traps us in a world which we didn’t choose. In this world, as in our world, there is a fear of losing individual identity, and a struggle to maintain one’s self.

Leah Katz earned a BFA in dance from SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Dance in New York. She went on to dance with Corbindances, Sidra Bell, Kevin Wynn, TakeDance, Yung-li Chen, and Gretchen Garnett & Dancers.  She participated in the Bessie Schoneberg Residency at The Yard in 2009, dancing in works by Rachael Lincoln and Joshua Monten.  Based in Berlin since 2010, Leah has performed with the Deutsche Oper Berlin and the Staatsoper Berlin, as well as with Leyya Tawil/Dance Elixir, Gretchen Garnett, Ariel Cohen, Liz Magic Laser, Liz Erber and Sally Richter.

Sally Richter completed her BA in dance at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAPPA) in 2005. She has worked with choreographers Chrissie Parrot, Gavin Webber (Dance North), Eun Me-Ahn, Alice Lee Holland, Aimee Smith, Lucy Suggate and Canan Erek with performances in Columbia, South Korea, England, Germany, Austria and Australia. She has choreographed the works Three Lovely Ladies, Private Thought, Public Space, Recoil and Crossed-Wires created for Bachelor’s students at WAAPA. She has been based in Berlin since 2010 where she now works in collaboration with Leah Katz.

A temporary monument to the outsider is an expanded cinema piece, exploring the condition of the outsider in an unknown territory, a sublime terra incognita.

Weaving together film, pre-recorded sound, live music and projections, the performance unravels into a mini-opera told through a series of audiovisual performative scenes.

Oh-My! is a 2-part show alluding to the representation of women in the 1950s: the oppressed woman vs. the “liberated” woman, represented by the Pin-Up Girl; kitschy fictitious women, trapped in ideas and thoughts dictated by a male-dominated society extreme to the point of near caricature.

The show is inspired by images from Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and comprised of video art, aerial acrobatics and the performance art of burlesque.

Photo by Alon Hadar