etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center

“I don’t want realism. I want magic! I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth.” – that’s Blanche, a refugee of her past and an immigrant to a place where she has to fight for her survival.

Her desire for love, acceptance, but most of all for attention, leaves her looking for an audience – especially since she’s left alone in her own story. Blanche wants to enchant and become enchanted. And because there is no one left to play these games of hers, someone has to be invented. While Blanche is getting trapped in her own net of fantasy and illusion, she turns the audience into witnesses and conspirators, watching and subtly becoming part of her battle on truth and desires.

Blanche is based on the main character from A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. In the version by Lieberman and Strehl, a single character experiments with time, space and consciousness. Throughout, an abandoned Blanche exposes and transforms herself, vanishing from her own world into the world of her audience. The audience affects her decision and mirrors her acting. In return: the stage reflects what the audience projects, followed by a fascinating interplay of perception in which the boundary between reality and fantasy disappears.

MARS ONE: VENUS ZERO is a one-man show exploring the recent outbreak of “Meninism”, an ever-growing backlash against feminism and women’s rights.

The piece will follow our misguided protagonist, Mike, as he prepares his audition tape for the MARS ONE space program (designed to send four individuals to permanently live on Mars in the year 2024) while he ponders the state of the Earth today and his fear of the pending matriarchal takeover.

Using storytelling, music and projection MARS ONE; VENUS ZERO is a provocative piece of interactive theater using the absurd and ridiculous to highlight a real and ever present danger.

Gem Andrews

is an English writer, director and professional musician from Liverpool, UK and has been creating work across the UK since 2004. Gem also works within the participatory arts sector between Berlin and Newcastle upon Tyne, UK; facilitating music and writing workshops for young offenders and is particularly interested in creating theater work through the voices of society’s most disenfranchised, in particular the LGBTQ community and the British working classes.

Currently living and working in the Neukölln and Kreuzberg districts of Berlin, Gem’s ongoing projects include writing the score for Chicken Pox Fox’s upcoming play Betsey Ann and promoting her new critically acclaimed album of original songs, Vancouver.

Richard Gibb

Richard Gibb is a theater maker and storyteller from Aberdeen, Scotland and has been creating work in the UK since 2008. In Newcastle, England he was a part of several theater companies that created original and thought provoking work ranging from walkabout festival performances to immersive storytelling theater. In England, Richard also worked for 6 years in the participatory arts sector, using the context of theater to engage with a wide range of people, from children with disabilities, to adults struggling with homelessness.

Richard is most interested in creating work that is original, relevant and engages with the community in which it exists. He currently lives in Prenzlauer Berg and works all over Berlin.

“Now then, we’ve done the questions, we’ve done the shooting. The ugly stuff. Well, probably not all of it.”

Inspired by (and, in part, adapted from) the 2014 U.S. Senate report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, This Is Torture presents a CIA interrogator on the other side of the table, answering to the voice of an investigative committee. The piece incorporates direct quotes and contextual details from the official senate report to both shed light on a particularly dark and disturbingly recent corner of US-American international activity and to involve the audience in an exploration of guilt, atonement and the unnerving instability of a banal evil. A look at the means, from beginning to the ends.

Suitcase Stability are the “anonymous” confessions of Liliana Velásquez, a wild woman with confidence and a lack of shame.

These misadventures have led her to Berlin. From a multicultural background, new to the idea of EXPAT she migrated to Berlin in search of love, with her double nationality and multiple personalities maintaining a relatively single lifestyle.

Liliana Velásquez is a trained actress dancer and singer, her stories and jokes combine a Broadway pizzazz and the gritty realism of a “retired” sex worker, daughter, sister and just all round international girl next door.