25 Jahre Mauerfall | Production Series

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Nasty Peace (copy & waste)

off-site event!
kottbusser tor, kreuzberg
Meeting point Kohlfurter Straße 33, 10999 Berlin!

there are only 30 tickets available for each performance. we highly recommend purchasing tickets in advance.

By copy & waste

winter was coming.
But we didn’t want to know.

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:

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copy & 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-

We Are the Play

Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer
Meeting point in front of the Visitor‘s Center
Bernauer Straße 119, 13355 Berlin

This interactive performance is an open-air parcours. Weatherproof clothing and sturdy shoes are recommended

By Sisyphos, der Flugelefant (SdF)

“Wir sind das Volk” (“We are the people”) was the chant of the protestors on the streets of East Germany. But who was there when two German states became one? Ms. Müller and Mr. Meyer? What about Ms. Gül and Mr. Ho?

Enter the world of “We Are the Play”: an interactive, immersive performance piece exploring the long-overlooked personal stories of immigrants and Germans of various descents over the course of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Based on research and interviews conducted with eyewitnesses, the duality of the experience of the Fall of the Wall is dissected as both welcoming and threatening – a collision of celebration with the anxiety accompanying freedom.The audience will be both guided and set free to explore those stories on the site of Berlin Wall Memorial, where they will experience a playful and interactive journey of the same event, examining the same questions from different perspectives.

We Are the Play uses the act of playing as a method for rediscovering the past, rethinking, transforming and as a path to each other in the here and now.

We Are the Play is a production by Sisyphos, der Flugelefant (SdF) in co-production with ETB | IPAC and in cooperation with ehrliche arbeit – freies Kulturbüro.

Funded by Regierender Bürgermeister von Berlin, Senatskanzlei – Kulturelle Angelegenheiten and Fonds Darstellende Künste e.V.

With the friendly support of the Berlin Wall Foundation, the Protestant Reconciliation Parish Berlin, Theaterhaus Mitte, multicult.fm and the Taiwanese Ministry of Culture

Pre-performance and post-performance discussions on Sunday, September 14 at 6:45 pm as part of Theaterscoutings Berlin

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Berlin Circle

Berlin Circle begins with the Fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 at the Berliner Ensemble and ends with a custody battle over the infant Karl Marx Honecker…

This satirical look at the end of the Cold War through a vaudeville lens brings together the real figures of Heiner Müller, Warren Buffet and Erich Honecker with a host of fictional ones to ask whether this war actually had a victor…

Inspired by The Chalk Circle (Huilan ji) a Chinese zaju play by Li Qianfu, written in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), which inspired The Chalk Circle by the German poet Klabund, which inspired Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, which inspired the Beijing opera production of Huilan ji by Hu Zhifeng.

True to the spirit of the playwright, who claims “there is no such thing as an original play”, Berlin Circle serves as the point of departure for our larger project 25 Jahre Mauerfall or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ossis/Wessis and the themes contained within it served as inspiration for We Are the Play by SISYPHOS, DER FLUGELEFANT (SdF) and Nasty Peace by copy & waste.

This scenic presentation offers the opportunity of experiencing Mee’s urtext before attending these dynamic, site-specific performances.

Charles_L_Mee Charles Mee has written Big Love and True Love and First Love, bobrauschenbergamerica and Hotel Cassiopeia, Orestes 2.0 and Trojan Women A Love Story, and Summertime and Wintertime among other plays–all of them available on the internet at www.charlesmee.org, and, as a free iPhone app at the iPhone app store.

His plays have been performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, American Repertory Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, the Public Theatre, Lincoln Center, the Humana Festival, Steppenwolf, and other places in the United States as well as in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Brussels, Vienna, Istanbul and elsewhere.

He was honored with a full season of his plays at the Signature Theatre. Among other awards, he is the recipient of the gold medal for lifetime achievement in drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Obies, of a Laura Pels Award, the Booth Award, and of the Richard B. Fisher Award.

He is also the author of a number of books of history (Meeting at Potsdam, The Marshall Plan, The End of Order) that have been selections of the Book of the Month Club and the History Book Club. He is the former editor-in-chief of Horizon magazine, a magazine of history, art, literature, and the fine arts. And he is a lifetime trustee of the Washington think tank, The Urban Institute.

His work is made possible by the support of Jeanne Donovan Fisher and Richard B. Fisher.

The Berlin Circle Audio Walk

On November 9, the world will mark the 25th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall and with it the beginning of the end of the so-called Cold War between the capitalist west and communist east, ensuring the dominance of our current globalized market economy. A quarter of a century later, what does all this mean?

Ten years after the Fall of the Wall, noted US playwright and historian Charles Mee wrote Berlin Circle, a collagelike collection of spectacular events set on November 9, 1989 which takes a decidedly satirical look at the end of East Germany and the western feeding frenzy that descended upon the former state property.

This binaural audio walk with original dialog through the real locations of Berlin Circle is led by the Producing Artistic Director of ETB | IPAC, Daniel Brunet, and will take the audience from the Berliner Ensemble through Checkpoint Charlie to the Pergamon Museum. Actors have been recorded performing dialog from Mee’s text at these locations that the audience will listen to via headphones, visually juxtaposed with the present reality of these sites and the cityscape between them. A binaural soundtrack of the route itself accompanies all of this as a third level of time lapse with recordings made several weeks earlier on the same day of the week and at the same time of day.

The Berlin Circle Audio Walk serves as an introduction to the larger ETB | IPAC project 25 Jahre Mauerfall or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ossis/Wessis.

Charles_L_Mee

Charles Mee has written Big Love and True Love and First Love, bobrauschenbergamerica and Hotel Cassiopeia, Orestes 2.0 and Trojan Women A Love Story, and Summertime and Wintertime among other plays–all of them available on the internet at www.charlesmee.org, and, as a free Iphone app at the Iphone app store. His plays have been performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, American Repertory Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, the Public Theatre, Lincoln Center, the Humana Festival, Steppenwolf, and other places in the United States as well as in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Brussels, Vienna, Istanbul and elsewhere.

His work is made possible by the support of Jeanne Donovan Fisher and Richard B. Fisher.

25 Jahre Mauerfall or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Ossis/Wessis

November 9, 2014 marks a quarter of a century, twenty-five years since the Berlin Wall came down, bringing with it the end of the Cold War, a new era of late capitalism and the reunification of both Germany and Berlin.

English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center will dedicate the second half of its 2014 season to examining the events of November 9, 1989 and everything after using the US playwright Charles Mee’s Berlin Circle, a play that takes place on November 9, 1989, as our point of departure.

Charles Mee has made a name for himself in the United States for the last three decades as a proponent of collage-based writing, incorporating texts from a wide variety of sources into his own. Accordingly, Mee offers all of his work for free on his website, providing that those work with his texts the same way he works with the text of others, as a starting point for something completely new.

In this spirit, we have commissioned two of Berlin’s most exciting international freie Szene groups, Sisyphos, der Flugelefant (SdF) and copy & waste, to devise brand-new, site-specific performance pieces as a response to Mee’s play, which, in turn, was influenced heavily by The Chalk Circle (Huilan ji), a Chinese zaju play by Li Qianfu written in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), that inspired Klabund and later Brecht.

The project begins with The Berlin Circle Audio Walk, a performance tour in August in collaboration with the B_Tour Festival, the international art festival of guided tours. ETB | IPAC’s Producing Artistic Director, Daniel Brunet, will offer a guided tour of three of the real locations of Mee’s Berlin Circle, the Berliner Ensemble, Checkpoint Charlie and the Pergamon Museum. In addition to ruminations on the past, present and future of these places in the Hauptstadt, each stop on the tour will feature dialog from the play in the form of recorded binaural audio.

The Berlin Circle Audio Walk will also be offered before the respective premieres of We Are the Play by Sisyphos, der Flugelefant (SdF) and Nasty Peace by copy & waste, along with a scenic presentation Mee’s complete urtext, Berlin Circle, at ETB | IPAC.

And before that, you can read the entire play for yourself right here!

Charles Mee has written Big Love and True Love and First Love, bobrauschenbergamerica and Hotel Cassiopeia, Orestes 2.0 and Trojan Women A Love Story, and Summertime and Wintertime among other plays–all of them available on the internet at www.charlesmee.org, and, as a free iPhone app at the iPhone app store. He was honored with a full season of his plays at the Signature Theatre. Among other awards, he is the recipient of the gold medal for lifetime achievement in drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and of the Richard B. Fisher Award. He is also the author of a number of books of history, and the former Editor-in-Chief of Horizon magazine, a magazine of history, art, literature, and the fine arts. His work is made possible by the support of Richard B. Fisher and Jeanne Donovan Fisher.

Dates

August 9 and 10 | The Berlin Circle Audio Walk – Performance tour of the real locations of Charles Mee’s Berlin Circle as part of the B_Tour Festival

August 28 and 29 | Scenic presentation of Berlin Circle at English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center

September 6 | The Berlin Circle Audio Walk – Performance tour of the real locations of Charles Mee’s Berlin Circle

September 11 – 14 | September 18 – 21 | September 25 – 29: We Are the Play, an interactive performance by Sisyphos, der Flugelefant (SdF) at Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer/Berlin Wall Memorial

November 8 | The Berlin Circle Audio Walk – Performance tour of the real locations of Charles Mee’s Berlin Circle

November 14 and 15 | Scenic presentation of Berlin Circle at English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center

November 20 – 23 | November 27 – 30 | December 4 – 6: Nasty Peace, a production by copy & waste, in and around Kottbusser Tor

off-site event! kottbusser tor, kreuzberg Meeting point Kohlfurter Straße 33, 10999 Berlin!