With support act Fat City Rollers acoustic duo!
Long before their fateful meeting, Chester Travis and Tim Hook shared a rich and varied musical history. The past few years have seen Chester release three EPs, score a feature length documentary and tour with Grammy Award-winning musician Kimbra. Meanwhile, Tim’s schedule had him touring Europe, accompanying singers in Vietnam and playing international festivals such as The Great Escape.Eventually the two would meet while working together in a guitar shop on London’s famous Denmark Street. There they whiled away the days writing together and composing the next chapter of their musical adventure. Now both living in Berlin and drawing on influences such as Elliot Smith and Wilco, the country-folk duo are recording an EP together and taking a full band on the road for a series of festivals and intimate shows in Germany.
This gig marks the second time Tim and Chester have played together at English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center but their first time with a full band.
Fresh from performing at Soundcloud’s Kitchen Sessions (a website which has seen her songs played over 50,000 times), Janine Villforth is bringing her 6-piece band to English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center for the first time.Hailing from Cologne, the 18-year-old songwriter cites influences ranging from Feist and Matt Corby right through to the old soul classics. Weaving thoughtful lyrics with catchy melodies, Janine Villforth is set to leave audiences mesmerized with a rich smoky voice far beyond her years.
Now based in Berlin, and currently recording a studio EP, here’s your chance to witness a star in the making!
Oskar Brown’s 100% improvised storytelling madness. YOU, the audience, bring a “THING”. It can be any “THING”, from the mundane to the unmentionable.
You place the “THING” in the cardboard box on stage, take your seat and let Oskar Brown transport you into his wacky world. Everyone should bring a “THING” and be ready for everything, because anything can happen. Don’t worry! Every “THING” will be returned after the show. Unbroken, undamaged, unconsumed and unsexed…
Featuring Chris Davis (Scotland), Georg Kammerer (DE), improv comedy from Good Luck, Barbara! and headliner Ben Kronberg (New York)
Hosted and curated by Paul Salamone (USA) with musical co-host Stephen Paul Taylor (Canada)
Two extraordinary women: Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist who savages neighbors, family, and political comrades with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her precocious and willful daughter, Miriam, equally passionate in her activism, flees Rose’s influence to embrace the dawning counterculture of Greenwich Village.
These women cast spells over the men in their lives: Rose’s aristocratic German Jewish husband, Albert; her cousin, the feckless chess hustler Lenny Angrush; Cicero Lookins, the brilliant son of her black cop lover; Miriam’s (slightly fraudulent) Irish folksinging husband, Tommy Gogan; their bewildered son, Sergius. Flawed and idealistic, Lethem’s characters struggle to inhabit the utopian dream in an America where radicalism is viewed with bemusement, hostility, or indifference.
As the decades pass—from the parlor communism of the ’30s, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, ragged ’70s communes, the romanticization of the Sandinistas, up to the Occupy movement of the moment—we come to understand through Lethem’s extraordinarily vivid storytelling that the personal may be political, but the political, even more so, is personal.
Jonathan Lethem was born in Brooklyn, New York, went to Bennington College, Vermont, lived in San Francisco, moved back to New York in 1994 where he still lives. Dissident Gardens is his ninth novel. Amongst many other awards he won the National Book Critics Circle Award 1999 for Motherless Brooklyn. Jonathan Lethem is currently a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
Watch the video trailer HERE !!
Isaac Newton wants to become a member of the Royal Society. Catherine wants to start a family.
Robert Hooke wants to know what Newton knows. The guy with the plague wants to stay alive. They conduct a risky experiment.
Afterwards, Newton doesn’t know any more than before but Hooke gets his sex diary back, Catherine’s skepticism is stronger than ever and the guy with the plague is dead.
Science moves in mysterious ways.
Isaac’s Eye mixes the facts of Isaac Newton’s life with an equal dose of fiction to explore what great people are willing to sacrifice to become great people.
It puts the history of science onstage, juxtaposing historical characters and facts with our 21st century based projection of them.
And by the way – it’s the best science comedy out there!
Lucas Hnath is one of the most promising voices in contemporary US theater. His other plays include Death Tax (Humana Fest/Steinberg Award), NightNight, A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney (Soho Rep) and Red Speedo (Studio Theatre, Washington DC). A resident playwright at New Dramatists since 2011, Lucas Hnath has enjoyed playwriting residencies with The Royal Court Theatre, London and 24Seven Lab, New York. He is a two-time winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant for his feature-length screenplays, The Painting, the Machine and the Apple and Still Life. He received both his BFA and MFA from NYU’s Department of Dramatic Writing and is a lecturer in NYU’s Expository Writing Program.
Isaac’s Eye is part five of Science&Theatre, a collaboration of English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center with Prof. Dr. Regine Hengge (Institute for Biology/Microbiology at the Humboldt University Berlin) and her team of young scientists.
Supported by the Andrea von Braun Stiftung
“Say Yes!” is the motto of IMPRO 2014, the biggest festival for improvisational theatre in Europe. 40 artists from 14 nations present entertaining, contemplative, dramatic, hilarious moments, celebrating the spontaneous theatre in 28 shows: whipped impromptu on stage before the audience’s face.
English Theatre Berlin will present five shows:
At the beginning of the festival, we present the prelude race through the world of film. You ask for a horror film, a spaghetti western, soap operas or documentaries, Ancient Rome epics or “Berlin School” – the international cast tries to fulfill every wish. Great cinema on the theatre stage — a trip on the roller coaster of cinematic pleasure.
It is always a special show when spoken neither in German nor in English, but in French. For the first time the ensemble Impro Infini is our guest, who in turn host their own festival (Subito) in the city of Brest, with whom we are cooperating. Both French colleagues meet Kevin (Dad’s Garage/Atlanta) and Lucien Bourjeily (Impro Beirut). The four of them will not only be inspired by the charming suggestions of the audience, but also by the special lighting mood and sound effects – o la la.
The sound of a city has a very special tone. This night is all about funny and tragic moments in daily life of a big city. Special about the show is that the inspirations intensified(?) come from those, whose part for the success of an improv-night is mostly underestimated: the musicians – in this case Hannu Risku (Stella Polaris/Finnland), Gilly Alfeo (Die Springmäuse/Bonn) and Rudy Redl (Die Gorillas) – will inspire the actors with their instruments and soundfiles and will push them to the peak.
Two years ago we tried this for the first time, and beautifully enough a lot went wrong: cell phone cameras were streaming improvised events into the theatre (which most of the times worked out, but got stuck sometimes) where the thread was continued until the next switch to the outside crew, and so on. Those in the mood for an improvised adventure and touching moments (one of the most impressive moments developed when things went wrong, and the actors did not know they were filmed) are in the right show. We work in cooperation with the great nerds of ape unit and attempt the improvement of this format.
The main focus of the festival. After we gave ourselves over to various playwrights in 2011, this year’s focus lies on the improvisational transformation/conversion of two directors (R.W. Fassbinder und Quentin Tarantino) and two genres (“Romantic Comedy” and “Fantasy”). The festival ensemble rehearses these special improv formats in two-day workshops each and improvises them on two nights. In English Theatre, we will present to you two movies in the style of the genre Fantasy and the director Tarantino – but not without having asked the audience for their associations and suggestions of course!
Her new highly acclaimed album saw her collaborate with New Zealand household names Warren Maxwell, Jean Pompey and Ed Zuccollo (Trinity Roots, Eru Dangerspeil) and UK producer Dan Goudie (Florence and the Machine, Katie Tunstall).
This year also saw Mara feature on ex-Genesis band member Ray Wilson’s solo album Chasing Rainbows. Her new independently released track “Fine Lines” saw her collaborate with Berlin producer Feeling Valencia aka Berlin sensation Abby. Having been picked up by Indie Shuffle and Hype Machine, “Fine Lines” has now gained over 10,000 listens with comparisons being drawn to the likes of Laura Marling and Lisa Hannigan.
But UK / Kenyan songwriter Mara Simpson doesn’t stay still for long: off the back of her 25-date New Zealand tour, Mara returns to Europe where she now calls Berlin home. Spring 2014 will see Mara and her band embark upon their first German tour, with their return to English Theatre Berlin marking a very special ‘home date’.
Support act: Hughes Brothers
Spending their early childhood years growing up on the isolated shores of Christchurch, New Zealand, The Hughes Brothers recently set their sights further abroad, currently calling the creative hustle of Berlin home. Both brothers found individual success’ back home in NZ with their earlier projects ‘Falter’ & ‘Alex the Kid’ and in 2011 the two brothers decided it was high time to combine creative forces and embark on their very own overseas musical adventure.
The brothers draw together their collective experience & influences to create their unique landscape of sound, described as a powerful mix of heart wrenching melodies, racy guitar stabs & memorable hooks.
Setting up base in Berlin, the Hughes Brothers unabashedly aim to steal your attention in 2014, poised for a double EP release with the first EP due out in April 2014.
Featuring Stephanie Tucci (USA), Stefan Danziger (DE), Jeroen Pater (NL), musical guest Luke Barrage (UK) and headliner John F. O’Donnell (NYC)
Hosted and curated by Paul Salamone (USA) with musical co-host Stephen Paul Taylor (Canada)
Ruth discovers a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the shore of her beach home. Within it lies a diary that expresses the hopes and dreams of a young girl. She suspects it might have arrived on a drift of debris from the 2011 tsunami. With every turn of the page, she is sucked deeper into an enchanting mystery.
In a small cafe in Tokyo, 16-year-old Nao Yasutani is navigating the challenges thrown up by modern life. In the face of cyberbullying, the mysteries of a 104-year-old Buddhist nun and great-grandmother, and the joy and heartbreak of family, Nao is trying to find her own place – and voice – through a diary she hopes will find a reader and friend who finally understands her.