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Nassim

Please note that this is a 2G event. All guests must present proof of vaccination against or recovery from COVID-19. People who cannot be vaccinated due to medical reasons may also attend if they have a negative PCR test and a letter from their doctor. As all guests must be vaccinated or recovered, we will not require social distancing or masks at this performance.

“Dear performer. I want to show you something. Did you know in Farsi my name is written like this: ‘.ROUPNAMIELOS MISSAN si eman yM’ ? Did you know ‘Nassim’ means ‘breeze’ in Farsi?”

From Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour comes an audacious theatrical experiment: each night a different performer joins the playwright on stage while the script waits unseen in a sealed box.

Touchingly autobiographical yet powerfully universal, NASSIM is a striking theatrical demonstration of how language can both divide and unite us. NASSIM is toured globally and is translated and performed in the native language of each country.

NASSIM won the Fringe First Award at the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and was subsequnetly performed in 20 countries within a 200-day span. In 2019, NASSIM landed in New York City for its American premier and an Off Broadway Run where the show won the Off Broadway Alliance Award for Best Unique Theatrical Experience. The five-month New York City Center run with over 150 renowned actors, writers, and creators included Michael Shannon, Tracy Letts, Kate Arrington, Carrie Coon, Lisa Emery, Cory Michael Smith, Kathy Najimy, Michael Urie, Phillipa Soo and many other theater, TV and movie stars.

And now, after around 400 performances, and following a long rest due to the global pandemic, NASSIM is back on the road starting with a two-night-only limited run in its hometown, Berlin.

Boris Aljinović was born in West Berlin in 1967. Even before he graduated from high school, he was discovered as an actor by the later co-founders of the ETB. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he attended the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst `Ernst Busch´ Berlin, and from there his path led him to the Renaissance Theater, to dwarf films and crime scenes. From 2001 to 2014, he was Kriminalhauptkommissar Felix Stark in the German TV series, “Tatort”. Like a lucky penny, he keeps on turning up at ETB | IPAC every now and again…
Lucy Ellinson is an actor and collaborative theater maker from North Wales (UK). She also teaches, mentors and works within community projects and campaigns. Recent UK theater credits include TYPICAL GIRLS by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm (Clean Break Theatre/Sheffield Crucible); MACBETH (Royal Exchange Manchester);  TOP GIRLS by Caryl Churchill (National Theatre), THE RESISTABLE RISE OF ARTURO UI / BertoltBrecht (Donmar Warehouse); A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM (Royal Shakespeare Company/RSC).  In Berlin, Lucy enjoys a long-term collaboration with Lydia Ziemke and Suite42, working on Dea Loher’s LAND WITHOUT WORDS (English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center) and WAR ZONE; research and development for HUSSEIN (Zoukak Theater, Beirut), ABOUT FRANCOIS (El Hakawati, Palestine) and the international digital project: THE SUN SETS EIGHT TIMES A DAY. Her own work is political and participatory, with a focus on community, austerity and protest: #TORYCORE (with Steve Lawson and Chris Thorpe) KAIDAN, ONE MINUTE MANIFESTO and WHEN I WAS OLD/ WHEN I GET YOUNG (recreated for the 2018 Expo Festival at ETB | IPAC).Lucy is a mentor and associate with the UK’s National Student Drama Festival and in Education Associate with The RSC and in recent years worked as an Associate Artist with London’s Gate Theatre, experimental performance collective Forest Fringe, Third Angel and The Deaf and hearing Ensemble (a collective of Deaf and hearing actors making formally experimental performance).
We´re looking forward to welcoming both Lucy and Boris back on our stage.

 

NASSIM follows Soleimanpour’s globally acclaimed White Rabbit Red Rabbit, which has been translated into over 25 different languages and performed over 1,000 times by names including Sinead Cusack, Ken Loach and Whoopi Goldberg including five performances at English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center in October 2013.

 “A strikingly gentle, humane and emotive consideration of the experience of an artist living and working in the diaspora.” | The Herald

“Emotionally charged theatrical experiment.” | The Stage

“An unusually vivid celebration of theatre’s liveness.” | The Guardian

“As he heightens the audience’s sense of complicity in his art, Soleimanpour makes a quietly persuasive case for theatre’s special power to foster empathy.” | London Evening Standard

Nassim Soleimanpour (playwright and performer) is an independent multidisciplinary theater maker best known for his multi award-winning play White Rabbit Red Rabbit. Nassim’s play Blank premiered in the UK at the Bush Theatre’s RADAR festival in 2015, also playing in Amsterdam and Utrecht with further performances all over the world including at the Edinburgh Fringe and in Argentina, Australia and India. Further plays include Blind Hamlet which premiered at LIFT Festival 2014 prior to a UK tour and productions in Bucharest and Copenhagen. Nassim now lives in Berlin and has been commissioned to write a new play for Teater Momentum (Denmark).
Pics: David Monteith-Hodge / Studio Doug

The Saviour

a new play by Irish playwright Deirdre Kinahan, produced by Landmark Productions, performed by Marie Mullen and Brendan Gleeson, directed by Louise Lowe and presented by the Cork Midsummer Festival.

The production will be streamed and available online from June 19th. Get more info and your tickets to join the stream here: The Saviour

The Saviour is a new play that charts the extraordinary shift in social, political and religious life in Ireland over the past thirty years. It asks questions about responsibility, about how we respond to trauma and about the tricky question of forgiveness.

Please join us for a special event:

In the Green Room with The Saviour | A Post Show Talk

June 22, 2021 – 19:00 CET

The Embassy of Ireland in Germany and the Consulate General of Ireland in Frankfurt are thrilled to present, in partnership with The English Theatre in Frankfurt, English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center, and The English Theatre of Hamburg, IN THE GREEN ROOM WITH THE SAVIOUR– a post-show talk with the team behind the brand new Irish play The Saviour.

For the first time ever, all of the English theaters in Germany are brought together in a partnership to present a theater piece to a nationwide English-speaking German audience. Utilizing the boundary-less nature of current pandemic-accommodating online activity, audiences can access the live premiere as part of Cork Midsummer Festival, and partake in this interactive Q+A to gain deeper insights into this highly anticipated play.

Moderated by journalist Meike Krüger, the acclaimed team of writer Deirdre Kinahan, director Louise Lowe, actor Marie Mullen and producer Anne Clarke will shed light on this exciting work that reflects deeply on cultural transformations in Ireland.

Join ‘In the Green Room with The Saviour’ on June 22 live on Zoom or from any of the partners’ Facebook pages. Register here to attend.

 

Let There Be Theater!

March 13, 2021 marks the one-year anniversary of the day theaters around the world went dark in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Our friends and collaborators Aurora Nova, the renowned international theater booking agency that represents the Berlin-based Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour, have invited us and hundreds of theaters around the world to mark this anniversary with a very special performance of Nassim’s very special play White Rabbit, Red Rabbit  by our dear friend GAYLE TUFTS.

The profits of the evening will go to theatermakers who had no work during the Corona pandemic!

We’ll let Aurora Nova’s director, Wolfgang Hoffmann, tell you a little more about the play:

“Ten years ago, almost to the day, I performed in a show at the Fadjr Festival in Tehran. At the festival hotel I was introduced to a young unpublished playwright, who did not have a passport, because he had refused to do military service. In order to get his work in front of an audience, he had devised a play that had to be performed as a cold read, without the need of a director, set or rehearsals. All it needed was for a brave performer to agree to read a text in front of a live audience, without first knowing what the play was about. I liked this young man and loved his idea and spontaneously agreed to help produce his show at the Edinburgh Fringe later that year. When I finally saw the show performed live, I realized what this playwright had achieved. Through the power of his words alone he had written himself to freedom.
Now, ten years on, the play White Rabbit, Red Rabbit has become one of the most widely performed plays in the world. It has been translated into over 30 languages and been performed by some of the most respected actors in the business. The playwright, Nassim Soleimanpour now lives in Berlin and realizes that our world is trapped, much like he was ten years ago. So the idea was born to offer his play as a vehicle to connect and empower producers, artists and audiences around the world.”

In 2013, White Rabbit, Red Rabbit was our second production after our reimagining as an international performing arts center – and we are thrilled to be able to offer this incredible work once again as part of Aurora Nova’s Let There Be Theater!

This time, we’ve found an absolutely legendary performer to accompany Nassim’s text.

Gayle Tufts, “Germany’s best known US-American”. Working as an entertainer, author, singer and commentator, Gayle has been a household name in Germany’s theater landscape since the 1990s, when she also gave some of her very first performances at a little basement theater on Fidicinstraße called Friends of Italian Opera – which is now English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center.

On March 13, at 8pm, we will be offering a one-night only live stream of Gayle’s performance of White Rabbit, Red Rabbit. Tickets will cost 10 €.

We look forward to Zooming White Rabbit, Red Rabbit with Gayle, Aurora Nova and all of you!

The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries

Did you hear? Our friends at SummerWorks in Toronto, Canada just announced their first summer presentation The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries: Summer Passport – a remote immersive experience from Outside the March!

We are thrilled to be partnering with SummerWorks and a community of organizations from around the world to spread the word that this special presentation is available internationally for the first time and entirely free to the public.

“Made-to-measure… executed so generously… [The Ministry] asked about my world, listened and then let me slip free of it, at 10-minute intervals.” -The New York Times

Finding yourself with a little time on your hands? Missing the uplift of live arts and culture? Is there a friend, a relative or a kid in your life who could use a daily dose of adventure? The meticulous mavericks at The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries have got you covered. This customized improvised narrative experience unfolds over a week’s worth of short daily phone calls, as our intrepid private investigators delve into your very own micro mystery using the investigative power of good conversation.

In Germany, Ministry agents will be available between 5pm-7pm / 9pm-11pm / 1am-3am. Tickets are going extremely quickly and can be booked, free of charge, at https://www.mundanemysteries.com/book-now-international

The Ministry’s Departments include:

·         The Misplaced Keepsakes Division

·         The Striking Coincidences ThinkTank

·         The Missed Connections Unit

·         The Paranormal Activity Task Force

At this moment of uncertainty, leave some of the pondering to the professionals as we work with you to untangle meaning from meaninglessness in the mundane.

There are only a limited number of appointments available for international investigations so be sure to book as soon as possible to get your daily dose of adventure during these unprecedented times!

A Better Life

If you want a better life, you must live a better life.

The performance A Better Life, a co-production from MS Schrittmacher (Berlin) and Brain Store Project (Sofia), deals with the question what a better life can mean and what we do to achieve it.

In European society, moving and being mobile is not only important, but also easier than it was ever before. This gives all European citizens the opportunity to move to a new place if they feel like there can be better options, better living circumstances or sometimes just better weather. We, as individuals, are all responsible to ourselves to live a life that we think is fulfilled and worth living. What would we give up to raise our standards? Are we ready to trade social capital for material capital? What does a good life mean to us and what does even a better life mean to us?

The concept of the performance A Better Life is a result of the research project LUXUS-WEG, funded by the Szenenwechsel (Change of Scene) program of the Robert Bosch Stiftung and a co-production between the performance group MS Schrittmacher from Berlin and ACT Association for Independent Theater from Sofia.

Over the course of this research, the choreographers and performers Martin Stiefermann (Berlin), Iva Sveshtarova and Willy Prager (Sofia) as well as the dramaturg Natalie Baudy (Berlin) have explored the migration patterns of German senior citizens living in old-age poverty going to Bulgaria and young Bulgarians coming to work and study in Germany. The focus lies on the questions of what compromises we make in exchange for a better life and what effects our decisions have on society. What is the motivation for those migration patterns within the EU and what does a better life even mean to us?

To begin, the team met in Sofia where they started their research and made contact with German retirees living in Bulgaria. Afterward, they traveled to Varna, Baltchik, Kavarna and the Golden Beach and talked to female German senior citizens living there about their motivation to start a new life in Bulgaria. They entered into intensive conversation with them, conducted interviews and became acquainted with their living spaces and their everyday lives. In February 2019, a further intensive research phase followed in Berlin, in which a corresponding catalogue of questions was addressed to Bulgarians living in Germany.

Status (Chris Thorpe, UK)

We all have a nationality.

Or almost all of us.

Status is a show about someone who doesn’t want his any more. About running away from the national story you’re given. About who is responsible
for that story and what might happen to it if you give it up.

A globe-spanning journey of attempted escape, with songs along the way.

Directed by Rachel Chavkin who won a Tony award 2019 for Best Director of the Broadway musical Hadestown.

“… the words are eloquent, the music essential and powerful, and the performance full of a brilliant, prowling precision…”

Scotsman Fringe First Award Winner 2018

★★★★ Guardian ★★★★Time Out ★★★★The Scotsman★★★★The Stage

“With its magical-realist twists, the show has the strange pull of a Haruki Murakami novel, a dense and provocative barrage of reflections on a world in flux and our place within it.” Guardian
“As ever with Chris Thorpe, the words are eloquent, the music essential and powerful, and the performance full of a brilliant, prowling precision…” Scotsman
“…a searching, meticulously crafted, beautifully written piece, full of fragile conclusions about nationhood and privilege.” The Stage
“Status is a sophisticated, hugely confident show, meticulously crafted in Thorpe’s bracing monologue and directed with assurance and remarkable insight by Rachel Chavkin…” ArtsDesk
“…a scintillating, rigorous critique of something we often take for granted” Fest Mag
“Thorpe’s metaphysical road trip is grittily real, discomfortingly surreal, densely poetic” Edinburgh Reporter

Supported by the British Council, Goethe-Institut London, the Collaborative Touring Network and using public funding by the national lottery through Arts Council England.

Rejection (Dirty Granny Tales)

Rejection, which many believe is Dirty Granny’s most successful production thus far, is performed in a way we have never seen before. The team adds another dimension to the narrative of the story, going down paths they have never dared to take before.

The production is inspired by the life of serial killer Ed Gein, which has prompted the creation of various murderous characters in literature and the cinema, including Norman Bates in Robert Bloch’s Psycho, brought to the screen by Alfred Hitchcock, and Leatherface in Tobe Hooper’s  film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Dirty Granny’s dark tales are a combination of live acoustic music, puppetry, dance and animation projection, strongly influenced by Tim Burton and The Residents, as well as Manos Hadzidakis, David Bowie, Black Metal and progressive psychedelic rock. They also feature contemporary dance involving dolls and movement in costumes, somewhat reminiscent of Japanese gothic theater.

The story describes the relationship between an authoritarian mother and her son. A mother who didn’t allow her child to feel love from anyone but herself. A child whose only contact with the outside world was through a small window. A child for whom other childrens’ games and smiles always remained inaccessible. His deprived childhood turned him into a repulsive creature and his rejection by humans was inevitable. His need for social contact led him to murder and ultimately to execution. The fairy tale unfolds in the world of the dead. How will the other souls there respond to him? Will they accept him or reject him too?

 

https://vimeo.com/350915549

Please, Repeat After Me

Following a sold-out performance in the 2019 Expo Festival and a rave review in Der Tagesspiegel, we are very pleased to welcome Please, Repeat After Me back for two encore performances!

I have millions of reasons to be crazy; give me one reason to be sane!

Or

Please, Repeat After Me is a play about decision-making and labels.

(We)* are left abandoned in the theater with a real mermaid: a fish incapable of being eaten and a woman incapable of seduction.

But the mermaid is real!

When does a stereotype stop being a stereotype?

When does a refugee stop being a refugee?

When does an actor stop being an actor?

 

Electra

ETB | IPAC & Berlin International Youth Theatre present

HARVARD COLLEGE STUDENTS with their production of the Sophocles classic, Electra, featuring Turkish TV star Ece Hakim.

A moving exploration of family and justice: Thousands of years ago, King Agamemnon ruled over Mycenae alongside his wife Clytemnestra and his four children Iphigenia, Electra, Orestes and Chrysothemis. All was well until Agamemnon’s sister in law, Helen, was taken to Troy. Now it was up to him to command the Greek armed forces into the infamous Trojan War which would claim many victims, including Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia, whom he sacrificed to the Gods in exchange for a strategic advantage. Upon his return, Agamemnon was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover. Electra, along with her dead father’s adviser, organized the kidnapping of her youngest brother Orestes, with the intent of training the young boy to one day avenge his father and murder his mother. Fifteen years later, Orestes returns to fulfill his murderous destiny…

This is the latest production by director Isaiah Michalski, actor of Lars Kraume’s award-winning film The Silent Revolution (Das schweigende Klassenzimmer). Michalski studies theater at Harvard College and is currently participating in the Schaubühne’s prestigious apprenticeship program.

The show will include an original score and live music by composer Marie Carroll.

 

Impro 2019

Improvised theater is surprising and always different at the same time.

IMPRO, the international impro festival hosted by Die Gorillas, is one of the biggest festivals of its kind: for the 17th edition from March 16 – 24, 2019, improvisers from all over the world get together in Berlin to inspire the audience with their spontaneous stories and diverse characters. The artists will sweep them off their feet with their concepts and ideas of improvised theater which go in the most different of directions to show the variety and possibilities of this special art form: Storytelling inspired by Aki Kaurismäki, Shakespeare or a local playwright, improvisers giving very personal insights in Role Models, Meta Impro and Community, an improvised radio play, the Improvision Song Contest and much more is going to happen in five theaters around Berlin.

IMPRO 2019 brings new shows and presents improv classics.

Stunning. Emotional. Connecting.

Community

March 16, 17 and 18 |  8pm

“Life in contemporary forms of capitalism is becoming unbearable, and one survival strategy is to develop and protect at all costs small communities that offer us different relations. With art, we cannot and do not aim at causing great social change but we can make room for collective creation, a space where it is possible to survive and even have a good time. Every moment is worth asking the very important human question of ‘How do we actually want to live together?’. And by doing so, we are finding answers along the way. Exquisite and daring performers from different cultural, economic and political environments dive into the topic of community.”

Maja Dekleva Lapajne, Artistic Director of the EU project Our Lives and the format Community

Theatersports

March 19 | 8pm

Sometimes it’s nice to go back to the roots. Many of those looking for new improv formats today started with this popular form of improvising back in the day. Several teams compete for the best scenes and songs, for the audience doesn’t just make suggestions, it also decides the champion of the night. It’s no coincidence this show format succeeded all over the world: it’s improv full of fun, imagination, suspense, speed and passion…

Not by Kaurismäki

March 20 and 21 | 8pm

The concise manner of speaking and the quiet humor of Aki Kaurismäki is the model for the improvisations. And we‘re getting back to basics.

Not by Shakespeare

March 22 and 23 | 8pm

It goes without saying that we won’t be able to improvise a play which matches the works of the British genius. But we can let ourselves be inspired by William Shakespeare and use the rhythm of his language as well as the structure of his dramas, comedies and tragedies as a template. A Shakespeare play about gentrification, digitalization or factory farming – that could be pretty cool.