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TERRAIN OF THRESHOLD VOICES

The exhibition and performance project Terrain of Threshold Voices is dedicated to forms of artistic research on language in relation to the transformation of the urban landscape though migratory movements. Inspired by the presence of written expressions (such as advertisements, posters, graffiti, t-shirts, etc) – which take the contemporary city as a textual surface – language phenomena are explored as terrains of friction between different communities.

It connects the ongoing investigation on dissident practices of precarious bodies within the framework of District’s dissident desire with the histories and present narratives of migration in Berlin that are examined by Aliens of Extraordinary Abilities? at English Theatre Berlin. Engaging with the interstices of different languages and cultures of space, Terrain of Threshold Voices manifests in an exhibition as a performative zone of conflict. Moving beyond normative attribution and cultural representation, the exhibition opens a language laboratory of threshold jargons that emerge from transitional states.

The project combines this experimental approach with performative movements throughout the district of Tempelhof-Schöneberg surrounding District Kunst- und Kulturförderung. The site-specific performances by Hanne Lippard and Wilhelm Klotzek take this microcosm as their field of exploration and action. Both the exhibition and the performances in the neighborhoods map out terrains, structures and movements which emerge at intersections and ruptures between different social narratives of Berlin.

tempelhof-web

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

November 13 – December 7, 2013
Exhibition opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday 2 – 6pm

November 12, 2013
6 – 10pm Opening
7pm La langue Schaerbeekoise lecture and discussion by Constant / Peter Westenberg
9pm concert performance by Jaume Ferrete

November 23, 2013
3pm PHONE-IN, CALL OUT. A disembodied tour by Hanne Lippard
6pm Terrain of Threshold Voices – READER Presentation by Pieterjan Grandry & Valentina Karga
8pm Broken Dimanche Press presents Dime Bumshow readings
9pm In-between-ness: creating, writing and living in-between languages, genres and forms lecture and discussion by Camille De Toledo

November 30, 2013
3pm Stätte – Stimme am Subjekt Performance tour through the Kiez by Wilhelm Klotzek
6pm City says lecture and talk by Nasan Tur
7:30pm Touristen fisten ist auch keine Lösung lecture and discussion by Peter Laudenbach

December 7, 2013
3pm Stätte – Stimme am Subjekt Performance tour through the Kiez by Wilhelm Klotzek
4:30pm PHONE-IN, CALL OUT. A disembodied tour by Hanne Lippard
6pm Closing – Performance program in conjunction with dissident desire Chapter 1: Exercises of Critical Bodybuilding with Alicia Frankovich, Emma Haugh, Dafna Maimon, Miryana Todorova

Exhibition

For Terrain of Threshold Voices, Anna Bromley will update her artistic work investigating forms of political expression within the scope of recent protest movement with an eye towards Berlin. In her installation, a karaoke version of protest speeches, the visitors can lend their voices to various political speeches. On November 10, her radio feature A City After Our Heart‘s Desire presented the urban resistance and “their” Berlin. The exhibition also includes Larissa Fassler with new work exploring Berlin’s Schlossplatz (2013), Jaume Ferrete with the video documentation of a choral performance as well as work by Constant and Nasan Tur.

Performance Tours Through the Kiez

Hanne Lippard PHONE-IN, CALL OUT

The phone-persona is delightfully visually shrouded, only surrounding sounds can give your lies away. There are no waterfalls in the city. Prior to our cellphone lives, a phone call had a given time and space, it was an agreement between two distant parts. In a culture depending on a phone to serve as a multi-tasking nomadic gizmo, Hanne Lippard’s call-shop tour is an exploration into the specificity of the phone-call as a fixed act in time as well as location.

November 23, 3pm – Meeting point: District Kunst- und Kulturförderung. Please sign up for the tour by November 21 by sending an email to post@district-berlin.de

December 7, 4:30pm – Meeting point: District Kunst- und Kulturförderung. Please sign up for the tour by December 5 by sending an email to post@district-berlin.de

Wilhelm Klotzek Stätte – Stimme am Subjekt

In his performance Stätte – Stimme am Subjekt, Wilhelm Klotzek connects the location of the Gaststätte (restaurant or public house) with garden colony politics and hardware store cosmoses through bold language sculptures. In the middle of the garden colonies surrouding the Priesterweg S-Bahn station , set off on a daring tour of ideas through territories of growth, construction and do-it-yourselfing. For a short time, you will be part of a movement you didn’t even know existed until now: weclome to the “multitool” club.

November 30, 3pm – Meeting point: SÜDEN Gartenlokal inside the Priesterweg S-Bahn station. Please sign up for the tour by November 28 by sending an email to post@district-berlin.de

December 7, 3pm – Meeting point: Restaurant ZUR ZIEGENWEIDE, opposite the Priesterweg S-Bahn station. Please sign up for the tour by December 5 by sending an email to post@district-berlin.de

Lectures and Discussions

Constant / Peter Westenberg, Nasan Tur, Valentina Karga & Pieterjan Grandry, Camille de Toledo, Peter Laudenbach and Broken Dimanche Press

Constant / Peter Westenberg La langue Schaerbeekoise

The exhibition will be opened by the Belgian collective Constant and a presentation of their long-term project La langue Schaerbeekoise (2010-2013) exploring the further development and renewal of language through various cultural influences.

November 12, 7pm

Pieterjan Grandry & Valentina Karga Terrain of Threshold Voices – READER

Building upon the basis of Valentina Karga’s socio-artistic engagement in the gardens near District and primarily upon its failure, she and Pieterjan Grandry will publish a Reader that includes a selection of text, quotes and references on the topic of the project as well as the individual contributions to the exhibition and can be purchased.

November 23, 6pm

Broken Dimanche Press Dime Bumshow

The editor in chief of the independent publisher BROKEN DIMANCHE PRESS, John Holten, invites artists, writers and performers to participate in Dime Bumshow. Slang, dialects and local expression will be investigated as literary phenomena within the framework of readings.

November 23, 8pm

Camille de Toledo In-between-ness: creating, writing and living in-between languages

Toledo Art Forms is the art platform through which Camille de Toledo writes and creates. From photography to fiction writing to theory to art installation, his work is endlessly designing a space in-between genres, identities and languages. In this performed conference, he will give us a hint of why Zwischenheit is the other name for his 21st century art and politics.

November 23, 9pm

Nasan Tur City says

Berlin-based artist Nasan Tur presents his exploration of international urban spaces for all kinds of graffiti and street poetry in his City says series. He develops various translations such as performances, videos or posters from the text material that connect current political realities with local everyday sayings and subculture expressions. At District, he will present his work Istanbul Says in a lecture and discussion.

November 30, 6pm

Peter Laudenbach Touristen fisten ist auch keine Lösung

Touristen fisten ist auch keine Lösung. Out of principle: I don’t want to have sex with people who consume the city I live in like it’s a picture on a postcard. The tourist is the perfect consumer. The city transforms itself into an amusement park for them. Inhabitants of the city are pieces of decoration or service personnel. In touristy Berlin, Guy Debord’s famous “society of spectacle” has long since become reality.

Peter Laudenbach is a theater critic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung and a theater editor for the city magazine tip. Most of all, however, he enjoys his work for the business magazine brand eins. He has written a good-humored aggressive book about tourism in Berlin: Die elfte Plage, published by Edition Tiamat.

November 30, 7:30pm

A collaboration between District Kunst- und Kulturförderung and English Theatre Berlin – International Performing Arts Center

Salomania

MARK JACKSON is English Theatre Berlin´s Fall 2013 Playwright In Residence.

He will direct a staged reading of his play Salomania.

In 1895, Maud Durrant moved from San Francisco to Berlin, Germany, to study music. Shortly after, her brother killed two girls in the belfry of a church. Their mother told Maud to stay in Europe and change her name, lest the scandal ruin her career. Now going by Maud Allan, she became a major celebrity in Great Britain as a dancer and society personality. In 1918, in the weariest depths of WWI, she was accused by a British MP, Noel Pemberton-Billing, of being a lesbian, sadist, and German sympathizer as evidenced by her having played the title role in a private production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome.

Against the advice of friends in high places, Maud sued Billing for libel. He then used the case as a platform to promote a conspiracy theory involving a secret German book listing the names of 47,000 traitors to England, all held under the thumb of homosexual German agents. While soldiers continued to fight and die in the mud of France, people back home read the latest on the salacious events of the trial. Salomania uses this story as the basis to ask questions about how people deal with anxiety in times of incredible change. How can a society allow itself to be both hysterical and “civilized” at the same time, and expect to function either well, morally, or respectably?

Mark Jackson is a playwright, director, and performer based in San Francisco, USA. He was Artistic Director of Art Street Theatre from 1995 to 2004, during which time he wrote, directed and performed in numerous productions for the company. Mark’s work in the San Francisco area has also been seen at Aurora Theatre Company, Encore Theatre Company, EXIT Theatre, Marin Theatre Company, Potrzebie Dance Project, San Francisco International Arts Festival, Shotgun Players, and Z Space, among others. Nationally at The Catamounts (Denver) and The Studio Theatre (Washington D.C.). Internationally at Arts International Festival IV (Japan), Edinburgh Festival Fringe (UK), and Deutsches Theater Berlin (Germany). Mark has been a resident playwright of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, where he was awarded the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Honorary Fellowship, and received a 2005 Bundeskanzler-Stipendium of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Mark has been a company member of The Shotgun Players since 2010.

Jennine Capó Crucet

THE US EMBASSY LITERATURE SERIES:
Jennine Capó Crucet reads from her novel-in-progress Magic City Relic.

Jennine Capó Crucet will be the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at Leipzig University in the fall of 2013, a program initiated by the University of Leipzig in cooperation with the German Academic Exchange Service and the Veranstaltungsforum der Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck in 2007.

Jennine is the author of How to Leave Hialeah, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize, the John Gardner Book Award, the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, and was named a Best Book of the Year by the Miami Herald, the Miami New Times, and the Latinidad List. The title story from the collection won a PEN/O. Henry Prize and appears in the 2011 PEN/O. Henry Prize Anthology. Originally from Miami, she is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Florida State University.

Jennine is the recipient of the John Winthrop Prize & Residency for Emerging Writers, the Emily Clark Balch Fiction Prize, and her work has been a finalist for both the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize and the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize. Her stories have appeared in numerous magazines. Her book reviews appear in the L Magazine, a New York City bi-weekly.

Pic: Andre Vippolos

PHIA

Imagine a happy Feist mixed with a young Björk and you’d be coming close to Australian-born, Berlin-based Phia. Her new single “Do You Ever?” features the otherworldly sound of her trademark African kalimba, and the loops and layers of her enchanting voice echo her unique and arresting live show which has fast gained her a reputation around Europe.

To celebrate the upcoming single’s release, Phia is touring around Germany this October. She is bringing “Mez Medallion”, AKA Joshua Teicher, the producer of her single with her. Combining his love of acoustic and electronic instruments with samples and the head-nodding joy of the pop song hook, Joshua weaves an immersive and adventurous brand of cleverly written electropop. He will be opening each show and also joining her on stage in her band.

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit

etb_WhiteRabbirRedRabbit_KeyVis_teaser_300 No rehearsals. No director. No set. A different performer reads the script cold for the first time at each performance. Will you participate? Will you be manipulated? Will you listen? Will you really listen?

Forbidden to leave his country for refusing military duty as a conscientious objector, playwright Nassim Soleimanpour distilled the experience of an entire generation in a wild, utterly original play from Iran. He was unable to experience the success celebrated by White Rabbit, Red Rabbit around the world until the beginning of 2013 in Australia. Having been retroactively discharged from service, Soleimanpour finally was able to receive a passport.

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit is a work about contemporary Iran, and of Nassim’s generation: the generation born during the incredible hardship of the Iran-Iraq war now in their late 20s and early 30s. A generation that has never known an Iran other than the Islamic Republic, yet a generation that is computer literate, and well‐informed. The art they are making is worthy of notice.

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit is a unique theater experience and has been celebrated worldwide as one of the most astonishing evenings in a theater where both audience and performer as a whole create a performance about the ties and tensions between freedom and conformity.

“The playwright slyly examines the desire to submit to authority and the ways in which that impulse can be exploited by the clever and the charismatic. Soleimanpour, who was 29 when he wrote the play, translates these dark and disturbing themes into an outrageous parable involving vials of poison, rabbits and cheetahs, oh my. It’s an intoxicating stream of consciousness from the heart of Iran that will leave you at once amused and alarmed.” San Jose Mercury News

“There´s a magnetic mind behind the prose. Rabbit is a lightly comic, deceptively discursive, meta-theatrical monologue that – without, I hope, giving too much away – raises provocative questions about the nature of theater, social responsibility, personal freedoms, suicide and the limits of obedience.” San Francisco Chronicle

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit has been performed in Edinburgh, Toronto, Dublin, Oslo, Glasgow, Oldenburg, San Franscisco, Brighton, Vancouver, New Haven (Connecticut), Amsterdam, Athens, Calgary, London, Montreal, Düsseldorf by performers such as Tim Crouch, Lucy Ellinson, Edgar Selge, David Greig, Sandy Grierson, John von Düffel, Guy Masterson, Imogen Kogge, Adura Onashile, Annie Ryan, Juliet Stevenson, Chris Thorpe, Janet Suzman, Pip Utton, Anna Thalbach, Chris Kondek, Gregor Weber and many others.

NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME IN BERLIN !

September 2013 International Comedy Showcase

For the last three years, Berlin has seen an explosion in English-language stand-up comedy. With regular open mics and showcases and springing up all over town in various bars, cafés and art spaces, dozens of Berlin-based comedians from around the world (including Germany!) are finding their voices and sharing their lives in hilarious detail. Now see some of the best the Berlin scene has to offer.

Featuring Stefan Danziger (Germany), Caroline Clifford (UK), a special goodbye Berlin set from James Harris (UK), improv comedy from Good Luck, Barbara! and headliner David Deery (US), curated and hosted by Paul Salamone (US), featuring musical co-host Stephen Paul Taylor (Canada)

Mara Simpson & Band

With a style of songwriting equally as eclectic as her background, Mara delivers an old soul voice with a unique perspective, recently quoted by New Zealand Musician Magazine as “Soulful, sincere, warm, rich and intimate. The songwriting is stunning.”

Her new highly acclaimed album saw her collaborate with New Zealand household names 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.

British/Kenyan songwriter Mara Simpson, who now calls Berlin home, is joined by her band Rene Corbet and Alex Bayer for a special performance at English Theatre Berlin.

Support act: Chester Travis & Tim Hook

No stranger to the Christchurch local music scene, Chester Travis met Tim Hook on the meaner, harsher musical streets of London. Together they worked in a West End guitar shop where in-store songwriting took precedence over sales as they began to learn their friendship ran deeper than just words. Now both living in Berlin and drawing on influences such as Elliot Smith and Wilco, the country-folk duo are currently recording an EP set for release in November.

ECHTER BERLINER !!!! IHR NICHT FUCK YOU

FUCK YOU TOURISTS. NO MORE ROLLKOFFER. WELCOME TO SCHWABYLON. Berlin U. Greetings from the Berlin welcoming committee in the form of meter-high graffiti adorning every available surface. One, ECHTER BERLINER !!!! IHR NICHT FUCK YOU, especially invites questions. What is a “real Berliner”? According to whom?

ECHTER BERLINER !!!! IHR NICHT FUCK YOU is a documentary theater piece exploring the diverging and converging experiences of so-called “expats”, often coming from comparably richer countries who travel to Berlin for self-realization, with those of so-called “immigrants”, often coming from comparably poorer countries for financial survival. At least, these are the generalizations.

For this piece, an international ensemble of six performers, each connected to a so-called “expat” or “immigrant” group, have conducted interviews with more than 60 members of their respective communities about their experiences in Berlin. Every word spoken on stage is taken from direct transcriptions of these interviews, revealing an oft-surprising picture of reality far beyond the banality of stereotypes.

ETB_ECHTER BERLINER__Lynn Femme4_foto by Manuela Schauerhammer

Production photo by Manuela Schauerhammer

ECHTER BERLINER !!!! IHR NICHT FUCK YOU is the first part of Aliens of Extraordinary Abilities?, a two-part project investigating the experiences of so-called “expats” and so-called “immigrants” in Berlin and the Hauptstadt’s rapidly changing cityscape. The second part, Terrain of Threshold Voices, a collaboration with DISTRICT Kunst- und Kulturförderung, will take place in November and December.

This project is funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds (Capital Cultural Fund).

New Work From New People

New Work From New People is an evening featuring work by writers, actors and directors who are new to English Theatre Berlin and our community that THE LAB presents every six months, in addition to its regular monthly programming.

The August edition includes excerpts from:

The Saint Factory by Lavinia Abbott

Banking: A Ghost Story by Kishore Chakraborty

Satie et Cocteau: A Rehearsal of a Play of a Composer of a Poet by Mike Czuba

Das Traumkabarett by James Harris

Mundo Overloadus by Michael Lederer

August 2013 International Comedy Showcase

For the last three years, Berlin has seen an explosion in English-language stand-up comedy. With regular open mics and showcases and springing up all over town in various bars, cafés, and art spaces, dozens of Berlin-based comedians from around the world (including Germany!) are finding their voices and sharing their lives in hilarious detail. Now see some of the best the Berlin scene has to offer.

Featuring Alex Upatov (Russia), Vincent Pfäfflin (Germany), Rey Melara (Honduras), Johnny Armstrong (UK) and headliner Drew Portnoy (US), with guest host James Harris (UK) and musical co-host Stephen Paul Taylor (CA). Curated by Paul Salamone (US).