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Berlin International Performing Arts Center

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Growler’s Grotto

Join Growler, the 82-year-old drum banging, shamanic vulva from the Liberties in Dublin in her Grotto, where no one gets left behind and no stone is left unturned as she takes you on a theatrical alchemical journey.

Growler is a sacred clown, walking the knife-edge of heartache and laughter. Using spoken word, song, storytelling and comedy, she confronts taboo topics, including grief and SA.

Her mission in these times is to help us love the ejjit out of ourselves. With a trolly in one hand and a staff in the other, she blazes a path. Her soul is a flame where everyone can warm the cockles of their heart.

“The beauty of Growler is in its roughness, its erratic meandering, its refusal to be one thing or another. It has a sacred chaos of its own, in which Mulrooney thrives.”
The List

Darragh McLoughlin

World-renowned Irish performer and circus artist Darragh McLoughlin presents a double bill! With Stickman and The Fulfillment, he turns all expectations of circus and storytelling on their head and paints a portrait of the shared moment in the theater space.

Stickman

Stickman is a performance which features a man, a stick and a TV.

The man balances the stick on various parts of his body, thereby setting himself and the stick in motion.

If the man has an agenda, he keeps it to himself.

The stick gets moved around and balanced by the man seeming to not have much to say.

The TV lurks in the background and throughout the performance puts titles on whatever the man and the stick are doing; thus attempting to dictate what the audience see.

All the while the audience watches and tries to keep up with the ever changing rules of play.

Then the TV titles them. ‘WATCHERS’.

Stickman is an exploration of our relationships with meaning, empathy and agency.

“The phantasmagoric movements created by each meticulously calculated move and the deep exploration of each stick elicited occasional voices of pure “wow” and “wow” from the audience. It was leaking.” Mayu Yoshihira (Daily Journal Editorial Department)
“I watched the whole thing unfold with excitement. That’s the only rule of the space magic called theater.” Sae Shimaizawa (Daily Journal Editorial Department)

 

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The Fulfillment

To fulfill: (verb)

1.    achieve or realize (something desired, promised, or predicted).

2.    carry out (a duty or role) as required, promised, or expected.

The Fulfillment is a modular, audience-driven performance built around a simple mechanic: an empty frame and a title. What happens next is determined by those present, and gradually as the fulfilled frames accumulate, an unpredictable live exhibition emerges, shaped entirely by those present.

Each performance becomes a portrait of our collective moment.

Darren McLoughlin was born in 1987 in Ireland as youngest of three siblings and son of two professional chefs. In 2006 he moved to Berlin to attend the Jonglier Katakomben School of Juggling. In 2008, he attended the Academy for Circus and Performance Art and completed his education with a bachelor degree in Circus Arts. In 2014, he was selected as a Circus Next laureate with Fragments of a Mind and has since created several acclaimed works: The Whistle, Stickman and For as Long as We’re Here. Besides his performance work he has created conceptual artwork series: The Fulfillment, Stories of Falling Objects, Variations of Stickman and WATCHERS.

Darragh teaches at different professional institutions around Europe: FLIC Scuola di Circo, ACAPA, Die Etage, CODARTS and Les Beaux Arts, HMDK Stuttgart.

Bad News

THE LAB: Artist and Audience Development

Bathe in wine, bathe in milk,
Bathe in horse broth, bathe in silk.
Ice, steam, sauna, spring—
Let your body sizzle and sting.

If you’re a bird: you use dust!
If a snail: a puddle’s a must.
Come one, come all, we must get clean.
Elly the Batheness of Berlin
Invites you to her bathing dream.

Bathing is glorious: water grants daily rebirth, soap frees us from what want to leave behind. Elly the Batheness of Berlin is enamored with it—in tubs, hammams, mountain springs or saunas; with a sponge, a brush, hands or a stone.

All bathers are welcome to this work-in-progress lecture-performance exploring:
What is a bath? What is bathing? A historical, a cultural, a social, an artistic and an American bath; and even bathing across species!

Bathing has deep waters—with topics like PURITY, FERTILITY, (RE)BIRTH, HYGIENE, OLFACTION, MODESTY and the FEMALE DOMAIN. Elly the Batheness of Berlin is going deep into bathing lore and invites you to join.

In 2026, bad ideas are great again!

Followed by a post-performance discussion

Puddles

What language does love speak? Does speaking multiple languages give us multiple personalities? What goes beyond language and right into our bodies?

Set in Berlin between the 1990s and now, Puddles is about a love triangle between three university friends, Judith, Max and Nora. Max and Judith were childhood sweethearts but broke up when Judith went traveling. Max and Nora got together, stayed together, married, bought a flat and are trying for a baby. These best-laid plans, however, as well all know, often go awry…

In this version, Max only speaks German, Judith only English and Nora switches between the two.

The LAB reading will be the very first work-in-progress presentation of the new multilingual version of the play, followed by a post-performance discussion.

Trigger warning: the play addresses sensitive topics, including discussion of miscarriage.

No One Comes Back

When one twin goes to war, can the other escape it?

When her twin brother is deployed as a fighter pilot, a sister finds herself in a war she never signed up for. Bombings, cornfields, deer eyeballs and shamans, No One Comes Back is a story about war, twinhood and what it means to save each other when no one really comes back.

The play moves between rural US-American childhood and the wildly different paths the twins take as adults. One heads into military service, the other into art school, Berlin and a string of questionable survival strategies. With humor and candor, it asks how families carry violence by proxy, how love persists under pressure, and if late-night phone calls can bridge the distance between two twins at risk of losing themselves.

This raw and unforgettable new play explores the ways we wage war and the complicated love that shapes us, whether we want it to or not.

omfg hamlet do i look like i care

William Shakespeare and the Bechdel Test

How much agency do female characters have in works of fiction? In 1986, US-American cartoonist Alison Bechdel provided a simple set of rules for figuring this out: the Bechdel test. Are there at least two female characters in the work? Do they speak to each other? About something other than men?

In all of William Shakespeare’s thirty-six plays, there is exactly one overlooked scene in a mostly overlooked play (Richard II) where two women converse.

With this in mind, omfg hamlet do i look like i care questions the supposed universality of Shakespeare’s themes. Combining Shakespearean language with modern dialogue and original text by creator/actor Kay Marie, the production investigates what happens when women are finally allowed the stage — and the conversation — all to themselves.

Two powerhouse performers take on a multitude of roles, including queens, noblewomen, podcast hosts, karaoke singers, dancers and professional bowlers. A male actor appears in a deliberately sidelined supporting role, used purely as a narrative device. What begins as an absurdly comic interview between two clueless influencers soon spirals into a chaotic, heartfelt, and surprisingly tender journey through female experience — both real and imagined.

Ein Sumpf bildet sich

“I love Germany. But in Germany now there is a swamp forming. At the moment just a swamp. But give it just a few more years. The swamp becomes a lake. The lake becomes a sea. And it swallows everything up.”

Staying with a German family while running a project in their local village school, a British-Iranian teacher contends with ancestral guilt, a possessed scarecrow and a rising tide of Islamophobia.

Followed by a post-performance discussion with playwright Charlie Dupré, moderated by Daniel Brunet

Cynthia

A drag-puppet-theater spectacle about the world’s first non-human influencer from 1937

Cynthia was a model, an influencer, a socialite, a celebrity and a household name in the USA in 1937. But unlike other celebrities of her day, she was dismantled into pieces at the end of her day and stowed away in a body bag. Cynthia was a mannequin. Her creator, Lester Gaba, a window display designer in New York City, became her manager, puppeteer and chaperone. He escorted her to dinner clubs, theater premieres and fashion shows,  as well as performing for her and responding to  her adoring fans on her behalf.

Let this delightful fever dream of a show take you down the slippery slope from entertaining spectacle into the uncanny valley.

Featuring Berlin Drag King Alexander Cameltoe as Lester Gaba, with his world animated by an ensemble of puppeteers.

Letters From Chiran

Letters from Chiran is a piece of mask theater performed by Tomoya Kawamura, inspired freely by the historical facts of the last world war and the stories left behind by young Japanese soldiers at the local shokudo (canteen) just outside the military airbase of Chiran in southern Japan.

The play delicately reveals the difference of perspectives between the lives of ordinary people in the midst of a largely devastating war and those who lightly make the decision of joining a conflict, compromising the lives of millions in the name of false ideals and personal satisfaction.

In 1945, the pilots of the Japanese Special Attack Units, commonly known as kamikaze, would share some of their stories, hopes and dreams with the owner of the shokudo while having a meal or a green tea before beginning what was, for many of them, their final mission.

Thanks to the owner of the shokudo, some of their last letters were hidden from the military censorship. She secretly delivered them to pilots’ families once the war was over.

Letters from Chiran forces us to ask: is there any scenario where sacrifice like this is acceptable?

Parataxe – International Literature

A PARATAXE presentation featuring the BERLIN ASIA ARTS CLUB:

The art of building bridges with words – a reading with Dasom Young, Mui Pooposaksul & Christina Ng. A special literary evening in English spoken language with sections in Korean, Thai and Chinese, hosted by Martin Jankowski.

Eine Veranstaltung der PARATAXE in Zusammenarbeit mit dem BERLIN ASIA ARTS CLUB und dem ENGLISH THEATRE BERLIN | INTERNATION PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, gefördert von der Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt.

An event by PARATAXE in collaboration with the BERLIN ASIA ARTS CLUB and ENGLISH THEATRE BERLIN |  INTERNATIONAL PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, funded by Berlin’s Senate Department for Culture and Community.