etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center

Do you want to be famous? Do you want to be a star?

Success. Access. Excess. All of it can be yours.

You were born famous. It’s just that no one knows it yet.

Fashion. Fortune. Freedom. All of it is yours.

You don’t create fame. Fame creates you.

But do you have what it takes?

The trick. The secret. The rule book.

USA bred writer-director, Catherine Duquette, has the secret. In her interactive, one-woman show, Celebrity Bound, she’ll show you how it’s done. Over the course of three nights, blending movement, video, scripted and improvised text, as well as audience interaction, a star will be born. Who will it be? Perhaps YOU are the next hot celebrity.

Watch the trailer here:

In a time dominated by social media, rapid data consumption and curated identities, Berlin-based performer and writer <strong>Catherine Duquette</strong> strives for closeness and connection. She specializes in audience-performer relationships, movement and improvisational scores. Her performances exact moments of heightened awareness and honesty on stage in an effort to dissolve the barriers that shape how we perceive and (dis)connect with the world around us. Her solo work has been supported by MOMENTUM Berlin, English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center, a Fulbright Fellowship in Spain, the International Festival of the Delphic Games in Greece and the Subterranean Art House in Berkeley, California. Catherine studied theater at Arizona State University and the British American Drama Academy in Oxford, England. She earned her master’s degree in Performance Studies from New York University prior to relocating to Germany. Despite frequent moves, Catherine calls the Sonoran Desert of Arizona home.

I’ve always been a celebrity. It’s just that no one knows it yet.

In her one-woman show Celebrity Bound, writer-director Catherine Duquette grapples with the polarities of celebrity and commonness, investigating her own relationship to fame and the personas that influence it. We admire celebrities for daring us to believe that anyone can achieve success, fame and fortune, yet we condemn them for seemingly having it all and for leading glamorous lifestyles that are well beyond our reach.

What are the forces behind celebrity? What drives the cultural phenomenon to simultaneously build and destroy the “Beautiful People”? How does celebrity negotiate the tension between access and excess? Through movement, language, video, scripted and improvised material, as well as audience interaction, Catherine moves fluidly between celebrity and fan, fantasy and reality, confronting her own desire for and repulsion towards becoming celebrity.

Original concept devised in collaboration with Michael Burditt Norton.

Watch the trailer here:

In a time dominated by social media, rapid data consumption and curated identities, Berlin-based performer and writer Catherine Duquette strives for closeness and connection. She specializes in audience-performer relationships, movement and improvisational scores. Her performances exact moments of heightened awareness and honesty on stage in an effort to dissolve the barriers that shape how we perceive and (dis)connect with the world around us. Her solo work has been supported by MOMENTUM Berlin, English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center, a Fulbright Fellowship in Spain, the International Festival of the Delphic Games in Greece and the Subterranean Art House in Berkeley, California. Catherine studied theater at Arizona State University and the British American Drama Academy in Oxford, England. She earned her master’s degree in Performance Studies from New York University prior to relocating to Germany. Despite frequent moves, Catherine calls the Sonoran Desert of Arizona home.

Featuring a short introduction and post-performance discussion on October 22 as part of Theater Scoutings Berlin!

Life as immigrants in Germany – setting off into alleged freedom, intellectual, political or financial, leads a man and a woman into somebody’s basement. One, seemingly a migrant worker, and the other, who at first glance appears to be an intellectual, are left to sink or swim in this barren environment. The reference to theater of the absurd is clear. Up to this point, Threepenny Theatre follows the dramatic source material of Sławomir Mrożek.

Then the text intertwines with the lives of the performers, is deconstructed through a Babylonian confusion of languages and the boundaries between intimate reality and performance blur. After all, Babylon is the everyday life of the performers: Marija Maki Lipkovski is Serbian and Miklós Miki Barna is Hungarian – they live together in Germany and speak Hungarian and Serbian, usually English and German with each other, and sometimes Italian, too. The fact that misunderstandings are just a regular part of the daily routine becomes the means to cryptic humor on stage.

Through a dizzying combination of mask theater, political and intellectual digressions and self-made films, these emigrants search on stage for the freedom they came here for in the first place. In doing so, they explore especially elaborate relationships between theater and film.

This results in grotesque hybrids: 1/3 human being, 1/3 stage character, 1/3 film character. It increasingly seems as though they are a chasing a ghost that is not to be found on any of the three levels, leaving them prisoners of a grand idea.

Watch the trailer here:

Featuring a post-performance discussion on October 2 as part of Theater Scoutings Berlin!