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Lovepuke

by Duncan Sarkies

lovepuke website 200 - 1(Girl) I want hold him
(Boy) I want to sleep with her
(Girl) I want to kiss him
(Boy) I want to sleep with her
(Girl) I want to have his babies
(Boy) I want to sleep with her

Everyone knows it. Everyone’s been there.

The trouble is, everyone has a different set of rules.

But what’s it all about anyway? Aren’t all modern day relationships a dysfunctional battlefield? A series of mind games? A struggle for status?

lovepuke_websiteOh, I know yours isn’t – but I bet you know of someone’s who’s is!

If so then come and chuckle contentedly at eight people who aren’t you make a mess of their lives in love

Love.

Or more precisely, the Game of Love: ‘Making the move’, ‘Elation’, ‘Sex’, ‘Argument’ then ‘Depression’. Sound familiar? Of course it does.

Image: Clare Molloy

Shenanigans

by Stephen Don

“The family that has no skeleton in a cupboard has buried it instead.”

A small village in rural Ireland: the local Public House is a resting place for men and women from the surrounding communities, and the local barman is considered a sort of modern day Ganesha, a knower of all that is important to the lost and a lover of every man and woman who is willing to spend their well-earned wages on a pint of stout. But fact is much stranger than fiction, and your best friend can sometimes become your worst enemy in the blink of of an eye…

 

 

Flhip Flhop

Rannel Theatre (UK)

Flhip_Flhop1Hip Hop meets theatre

Everything happens on the break – Hip Hop meets theatre in this brilliant and exciting show by two great Hip Hop DJ s from London. With Flhip Flhop they took the Edinburgh Festival 2009 by storm performing for three weeks to sold-out houses !

“This is a genuinely laugh-out-loud funny show, skilfully executed with razor sharp timing and intrinsic hip hop skills”  THE LIST !

A crazy pair of painters escapes the monotony of their dull jobs by taking refuge in hip-hop, Mc-ing and beatbox, mixing it up but usually ending up just mixed-up!

The elements of Hip Hop are hidden and twisted into a dynamic physical performance using found objects and intricate choreography to create an energetic and spontaneous comedy

Rannel Theatre  was founded by JoeyD and Matt Bailey. Matt Bailey has performed in plays off-Broadway and has had a professional career in dance and performance. He is also a DJ and has performed across the UK, Europe and America, releasing CDs to critical acclaim with DJ Para. Joey D is a true hip hop artist who has been representing the b-boy culture for almost a decade. At the age of 24 Joey D has already made a name for himself in the UK due to the originality of his dancing and his aggressiveness in battles, which represent the real rawness of the culture. Besides constant teaching and workshops Joey D tours theatres and schools and competes in competitions across the UK, Europe and America.

HIP HOP MEETS THEATRE – A perfect story in Hip Hop – Breakdance, Scratch and Battle. Everything happens on the Break.

Pic: Mark Sherratt

The Mooonshot Tape

by Lanford Wilson

moonshot-websiteHaving come home to visit her mother who has been placed in a nursing home, Diane, now a well-known writer, is being interviewed for the local newspaper. Her remarks are an answer to questions such as where she gets the ideas for her stories, whether her youth in Mountain Grove influenced her work and why she decided to leave home. At first obliging and matter-of-fact, Diane gradually reveals more than her interviewer might have bargained for a childhood marred by the loss of her father and her mother´s coldness; the promiscuity which she was driven to in search of the love and concern which were denied her at home; and, most devastating of all, the molestation by her stepfather which shaped her character indelibly – and led to the harrowing event which she describes at the end.

To the world at large Diane is someone who has shaken off the dust of Mountain Grove and has gone on to bigger and better things. To herself, however, it is painfully clear that what she is is what her earlier life ordained – because no one ever really leaves the place from which they came.

Lanford Wilson, born 1937 in Missouri, is one of America´s most courageous and innovative playwrights and is considered one of the founders of the Off-Off-Broadway movement starting out in the gay community in New York´s Greenwich Village. He has written numerous plays, and in 1980 received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Talley´s Folly.

Natalia Maskevich was born in Russia and moved with her family to Brussels, Belgium where she studied dramatic arts at the Conservatoire Royal. Throughout her international career in film, TV and theater she has performed in four different languages. In 2004 she moved to Paris starring in the TV series Plus Belle La Vie. She has since worked on many theatre pieces.

Land Without Words

by Dea Loher

Lightbulp-website3War meets art in this intimate parable. A painter immerses herself in the creation of a real experience with the perfect image. But in K., a Middle Eastern city, the real images outshine and overshadow everything. She is shaken by the experiences of the effects of war, violence and poverty, impossible to depict. Now, forced to confront her lifelong beliefs in the value of art, she also questions how to deal with her position in the world today.

Lucy Ellinson was nominated for BEST SOLO PERFORMANCE at the 2009 Edinburgh Festival Fringe for Land Without Words.

Written with an astonishing sense of immediacy and the dry wit of someone being thrown into an unknown world, this is a powerful piece of poetic realism from one of Europe’s most original, prolific and challenging voices.

 

Dirt

by Robert Schneider

DIRTAn Iraqi immigrant tells his story. His name is Sad. He lives here illegally. At night he walks our streets and sells roses. He loves to speak our language but nobody listens. Will you?

 

Critically acclaimed in New York, Vienna and Edinburgh, this one-man show explores what it means to be ‘invisible’ in our society.

“Riveting!” Time Out **** (Critic’s Pick, 4 stars)

“See this show…captivating and utterly heart breaking!” NYTheatre.com

“Powerful, mesmerizing and thoroughly enthralling” Talk Entertainment

Marx in Soho

by Howard Zinn

MarxInSohoImagine all Karl Marx would have to say after one hundred years of just being able to watch…

Howard Zinn’s Marx in Soho portrays the return of Marx. Embedded in some secular afterlife where intellectuals, artists, and radicals are sent, Marx is given permission by those in charge to return to Soho London to have his say. But through a bureaucratic mix–up, he winds up in SOHO in New York. Marx returns to clear his name but in doing so he gives the audience glimpses of Karl Marx seldom talked about; Marx the immigrant, Marx the father, Marx the husband, Marx the Man. With captivating wit he shares tales from his life with his wife, daughters, friends and enemies.

Howard Zinn’s Marx alone occupies the stage. “Marx has different voices. The actor has to show Marx’s outrage at social injustice, express the pedantic Marx, the vindictive Marx, Marx, the loving family man, Marx as Humorists, and a Marx that can laugh at his enemies”

misstcommunication

by The Long Song (Berlin)

an American opera of modern lovers

missTcommunicationA modern parable of love in the 21st century told through two short American chamber operas: The Telephone by Gian Carlo Menotti and The Letter by Brian Hulse

One man, two women and too many phones – Chivalry may not have been killed by Man. In a world of iphones, bluetooth, Skype, & IMs, a sit down, face-to-face conversation seems to be a thing of the distant past. At least that’s what Lucy apparently thinks in the comedic opera The Telephone. Written in 1947 as a social commentary on the encroachment of technology on modern life, Gian Carlo Menotti is again made pertinent in this contemporizedImageinterpretation. A modern parable about the pitfalls of telecommunication, the battle between man and technology is on. Will the couple ever have their Happily Ever After when the telephone is constantly engaged?

Whether irked or inspired by the short sms, the urgent email, the quick IM, are we cured of loneliness forever? Connected, collective, communal; one love, many loves or no love at all?

The second piece of the evening tells the story in the European premiere of Brian Hulse’s contemporary opera The Letter (written in 2003, based on Edith Wharton’s story The Dilettante). Behind the paints and veils of Victorian society, a common theme is the image of women as vulnerable, wilting flowers forever outwitted and overpowered by men. But lurking under the ruffled façades of yesteryear, the mind games between women and men seethed away, masked only in witty allusion. Thursdale´s disreputable affair with Mrs. Vervain may have seemed innocent amidst the backdrop of parlor society in Edith Wharton’s time and when Thursdale proposes to another woman, Miss Gaynor, one may think that man would again trump the ladies in deceit. It is the women however, in this ménage, who rise victorious as they parry in this Suffrage-era tale of an early Women´s Liberation. In the end they extract justice of their own from a culture often too permissive of its men.Image

The artists of THE LONG SONG came together early in 2008 in dedication to American vocal repertoire, much of which remains largely unperformed in Europe. For missTcommunication they´ve chosen one standard and one unknown work of American short opera, both centered on the themes of desire and the need for real connection and intimacy which gets so often lost in our modern society.

Blue Vein

by Duncan Sarkies

elsathorp-bluevein-websiteA tragic tale of an unremarkable man with an all-too-human weakness

It all starts with an innocent cheddar cheese roll, and for a while there Zack seems to have his consumption under control. But when he starts sneaking into the back rooms of parties to get his Camembert fix, spending unhealthy amounts of time at fondues and closing down vital laxative bodily functions, it is clear (to everyone around him, at least) that things have gone desperately wrong…

Alan Glen is a singer-songwriter from Canada. He spent over ten years touring Canada and Europe with his independent band before relocating to Berlin. Since then he has been dividing his time between music and the comedy theatre group Laugh Olympics. Blue Vein is his debut in the theatre as a solo performer.
Fingal Pollock has now been in Berlin for over one year. She came here after spending 18 months studying theatre with a small company of actors in rural India. In Berlin, she has worked with Laugh Olympics, Platypus Theatre, Three of Cups Productions, Galli Theater, Be Berliner, and the TUSCH in Schools project (not to mention some healthy clowning on the side!). She directed a successful run of Blue Vein in New Zealand, but when she met Alan Glen, she knew that she could not deprive the Berlin audience, and herself, of the opportunity of watching him bring this script once again to life.
Duncan Sarkies is a playwright, screen writer, fiction writer and stand-up comic. All of his work is characterized by an eccentric, bizarre and poignant black humour, which can leave the audience wondering whether the author is laughing with them or at them. Sarkies likes to show the ways in which all of us are, if not quite mad, then at least partly unhinged.
Photo: Elsa Thorpe

The Harvest Chamber

For sixty minutes, you are transferred one-hundred years into the future…

…where machines are our gods and human contact is non-existent. Welcome to Gens Incorruptus where members of the society are only intimate with their keyboards.

One day, a male and a female are chosen take part in an experiment. They must meet face to face and form a physical and emotional bond. Is this possible?

Join GI7849 & GI3319, now reborn as Adam and Eve, to find out how it feels to speak for the first time, to meet another being in the flesh and blood, to discover that male and female can be man and woman.They have one hour to perform the task and produce a youngling as directed. Will they succeed?