etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center

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.