THE LAB: Artist and Audience Development
Elly Jarvis is a theater maker of many passions and interests, who wholeheartedly believes in play as an emancipatory and transcendental act and theater as a forum for examining polemics, for encouraging dialogue and for inviting humans to listen and to witness. Trained classically at the University of Michigan in Theater Performance, she received her Master’s in Theater Education at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she taught her first course on devising theater summer semester 2025. Her work is almost always participatory: such as Blaupause (FELD Theater 2024/2025), an interactive children’s theater piece about sadness in conjunction with the color blue; currently she is working on a piece called The Very Best! (Das Allerbeste!) with an inclusive group and the RambaZambaTheater. Elly works regularly for the Berliner Ensemble, the Deutsche Oper and does KulturMachtStark projects for the ATZE Musiktheater.
For Elly, theater is a marvelous excuse to dig deep into questions that tantalize her, it pushes her to find aesthetic forms that expand her understanding of that which makes her curious. Many things make her curious, but the primary list is currently: snails, colors, slowness, dialogue, sidewalks, lifestyles, boundaries, gender, arrangements, impressions, visual arts and paintings, to name a few.
In her residency, Elly will dive deep into one of her curiosities in a manner that is participatory and stimulating to the audience. She will be recently back from the United States and full of impressions, photographs, interviews and certainly some concerns. Expect a work-in-progress with a deep foundation in research and exploration, an invitation to participate in this exploration and an open-ended question.
Followed by a post-performance discussion
Gats Surprise is a short solo trip of an elusive creature named Gats, originating from the world of the performance Scapes of Landscape by tYhle. Gats surprise not only the audience but also themselves in what they turn out to be. They have a large family, but suffer from loneliness. They are interested in Tarkovsky and comic books. They look completely different on the inside than they do on the outside, but no one knows how.
A choreographic cleansing journey, where daily kids-toys, music and actions take a hyperreal shape under the dual horizon of love and death, violence and emancipation, childhood and adulthood, father and mother. Unveiling the paradoxical resistance and violence of accepting to perform a role, in an imposed narrative, in which one is a byproduct or consequence of it. A performance which does not pretend to answer any question. A performance that happens at the friction between: what we imagine is happening and what is actually happening.
One body, a bunch of black balls, a clear task and countless greed. A dance performance inspired by the principles of the clown fi gure and black hole theory. DEVOURER exists only to have. In a determined eff ort to take everything for its own, it absorbs light, inhales space and materializes time. Its transformation manifests gradually. A body of greed caught in action. How can the „self“ be maximized? Singularity. It’s a hypothetical point. „I am a star, I shine like a supernova…or have I become a black hole?“
The main goal of this work in progress is to develop a choreographic strategy of deviation in which the norms of movement are provoked and expanded. Kysy creates a chain of associations between movements, sounds and images. Thoughts, words and sentences deviate, taking new paths and constructing new meanings.
In 
