etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center

A meditation on freedom, loss and grief

The artistic duo BirdMoon – Stephen Mooney and Dorothy Bird – invite artists Aude Gouaux Langlois, Nadine Milzner, Natasha Jaffe and Michael Haeflinger to join an artistic interdisciplinary and interactive “conversation” by means of music, dance, poetry, visuals and soundscape.

The performance piece Out of the Dark explores the desire to escape from darkness, both physical and mental, and its propensity to linger and echo into the light as repetition or distortion of memory. Within these loose parameters, the artists work to create clarity out of chaos, harmony out of passion and create light within the dark.

A physical exploration of the hysterical joys and melancholia of youth

What adolescent events, personally and politically, shape the performance of gender as 20-somethings? At a young age, dance artists Aliina Lindroos and Susie Yugler were both called lautas (or ironing board, i.e., “she’s flat as a board [lauta]”).

LAUTA aims to understand how childhood heartbreak, trauma and loss echo in the body. The work investigates the female gaze and the implications of a feminized body in multiple modes of performance.

A performance about memory or the lack of it

“Sometimes I feel this planet is nothing but a giant loop machine. Going ‘round and ‘round and around we go. And here we are, going ‘round, doing the same old stupid things, over and over again. In love, relationships, in politics, with our thoughts, with our beliefs, with fashion…”

“When I was a child my mother used to tell me that I am a citizen of the world. Of course I believed her, she was my mother. But the older I got, the more I understood that this was just my mother’s dream.”

This performance by Welcome Project. The Foreigner’s Theatre is dedicated to a reflection on the idea of borders, identity, the concept of nation, and country of origin. The European Union got us used to low-cost travel and making ourselves at home in every country of the EU. Now, the old world is running scared and putting itself on lockdown: the Mediterranean Sea now seems to be made out of barbed wire. Borders exist hidden in plain sight everywhere.

A symphony of fight by EX-teater

Live music, storytelling and body percussion interweave to create a sound-based performance to be watched through the ears. It is inspired by Daniel Veronese’s dramatic poem Ringside, in which women brutally fight for the privilege of having a very unique prize. In the story, this year’s trophy is a bridegroom, the offspring of the union between a female sailor and a shark. From one round to another, the fight gets louder and fiercer, but the prize seems well worth the suffering.

Witnesses carefully follow the fight, blinded by the whiteness of the ring. They beg their children not the look at it, but the children can still listen. They listen to cruelty, they listen to stories.