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Where Ye From?

By Growler

Meet Growler, the 82-year-old drum banging, shamanic vulva from the Liberties in Dublin.

Wise as witches with a tongue like a lash and a heart of gold, she will take you on an alchemical theatrical journey.

Using storytelling, song, spoken word and comedy, her mission is to give voice to the voiceless and to transmute the shite out of the female collective trauma.

The performance on November 9th will inaugurate Growler’s Sofa Sessions and feature visiting musician Damien Dempsey and Berlin-based Wallis Bird in a one-night-only event called Songs From the Holywell!

This promises to be a very special night of storytelling, song and conversation between kindred spirits.

“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

Rhythm in Sediment

The very first performance of new work-in-progress by Anna Lublina, followed by a post-performance discussion.

This research seeks to access ancestral knowledge through synchronization: a process of syncing one’s body rhythms with the rhythms of other people, objects or environments. Emerging from archival research on different forms of shared Jewish-Muslim rhythm—Uzbeki Shashmaqam music, prayer, agricultural practices, etc.— we explore tap dance, extended vocal techniques and live mixing to embody specific rhythms and synchronize with the worlds they emerge from.

How do these rhythms from historical moments of Muslim-Jewish conviviality generate different physicalities, states, tensions or intelligences in our bodies? What can these convivial rhythms teach us in a time marked by separation and violence?

Colonizing The Skies

The very first presentation of new work-in-progress by Noémi Ola Berkowitz, followed by a post-performance discussion.

The sky has long been a place of comfort, spirituality, looking upward, and fantasy. But the colonization that marks the rise of empires and nations on land now threatens our atmosphere. The unique combination of technology and ancient stories in the skies above prompted Noémi (who presented new work-in-progress in our 2017 Expo Festival) to gaze upward for this next theatrical project.

The Money Piece

The very first work-in-progress performance of a new solo by Alexander thomas, followed by a post-performance discussion.

Cash, Jack, Scratch…Moolah.

No matter what you call it, they say that money makes the world go round and most of us seem to spend far too much time thinking about it.

We are very pleased to welcome back actor and playwright Alexander Thomas (Schwarz gemacht) to share and perform the very first work-in-progress showing of his new solo, The Money Piece.

Salvation (Glitter Doesn’t Care I’m A Boy)

A science fiction drag ritual and an experimental invocation for a constant distribution of desires based on visions and fantasies Shlomi Moto Wagner has experienced since he was three years old.

It explores transformations, mutations and remanifestations of the idea of being, the sensuality of being a body, the politics of having
a body and the poetics of sharing a bodily experience.

This solo music theater piece is a mythological and poetic reading of current pop culture and its academic discourse. The music of ancient
Jewish texts and invocations together with visionary tunes of composer Hildegard von Bingen from the 12th century is newly arranged with pop hits, techno compositions and contemporary feminist texts. All of this makes the opera performance a ritual of transformation.

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Shlomi Moto Wagner is Mazy Mazeltov, is Wendy Williams, is Wisława Szymborska, is Fran Drescher, is Hélène Cixous and her Medusa is David Copperfield and Claudia Schiffer IN ONE BODY! And much, much more.

So, what is reality here and what is fiction? In times where a part of society wants to return to the gender roles of the 1950s, or even the 1940s, it is that much more critical to celebrate a festival of the imagination. Let’s make magic. And what comes out at the end? A concert, a drag queen musical, a monologue slam, a magic show, a bar mitzvah or simply a party with the people? Are the props ready? Powder, lipstick and glitter? All right!

Vortex

Immerse yourself in the mesmerizing world of sound and light at Vortex – the newest rendition of the renowned Piano & Light concert series. Join creators Mirella Brandi and Muep Etmo as they return to Berlin for this exclusive performance on September 13 and 14 at 8 PM!

The MXM Duo transcends traditional stage boundaries with an immersive concert experience. Comprised of Mirella Brandi and Muep Etmo, MXM is already recognized in Berlin’s contemporary art scene for their captivating performances. Their interpretation of contemporary compositions for piano and light creates a sensory masterpiece.

Mirella Brandi is a light art designer and Muep Etmo is a musician, composer and sound engineer. They explore the complex relationship between light and music through immersive, multidisciplinary performances that synthesize concepts from cinema, contemporary music, and visual arts.

Get ready to elevate your senses and be transported by new dimensions through light and music!

Second Class Queer

Actor and writer Kumar Muniandy questions his identity, queerness, internalized homophobia and experiences of racism with his play. In the midst of these terms and their politics, Kumar seeks his own truth.

Is it possible to live as a brown gay man in Germany and find healing while carrying the weight of oppression from his motherland? Set in a speed-dating event, will Kumar’s leading man, Krishna, win the role he wants in this audition for love?

Through the lens of his experience as a Tamil-Malaysian queer person living in Berlin, Kumar Muniandy has developed a theater piece that investigates the connections between internalized homophobia that stems from anti-homosexuality laws of the colonial era and the structural racism he experiences.

What are the consequences of such merciless neocolonialism for the mental health of queer minorities living in Germany today? After all, Krishna, like Kumar, is on a pursuit of forgiveness and self acceptance.

Second Class Queer is dedicated to Nhaveen.

Following a work-in-progress presentation as part of the 2022 Expo Festival, we are thrilled to offer additional performance of the finished version of this production.

Josephine Baker – Mirror and Shadow

Josephine Baker – Mirror And Shadow explores a symbolic connection between Josephine Baker (1906-1975) and Étoile Chaville (1982-). Both artists are of African descent, dancer-singers and have French citizenship. However, seventy-six years separate them and their lives have unfolded in very different socio-economic contexts.

What connects them? Which struggles had to be overcome in Josephine Baker’s time and are still relevant today for women who don’t fit neatly inside a box? Built as a dialogue between past and present, Josephine Baker – Mirror And Shadow questions stereotyped images around races, gender or sexuality and their influence on our vision of the world and the Other.

The work-in-progress showing will be followed by a conversation with Dr. Brenda Dixon Gottschild. Multi-award-winning author Brenda Dixon Gottschild is an antiracist cultural worker. Nationwide and abroad she curates post-performance reflective dialogues, writes critical performance essays, performs self-created solos and collaborates with her husband, choreographer/dancer Hellmut Gottschild in a genre they developed that is called “movement theater discourse”.

SLUT: A Love Story

SLUT: A Love Story is a vibrant manifesto of joy, feminism and sexual exploration. Through the lens of her own life, performer and self-identified slut, Anne Marina Fidler courageously navigates the impacts of heartbreak, sex work and technology on this identity. Employing storytelling, dance and audience participation, Fidler crafts a compelling narrative that is both humorous and sincere.

Drawing from her own rich and charmed sexual history, Fidler invites audiences to participate in a narrative that celebrates the complexities of sex as part of our fully realized selves, while still acknowledging the collective trauma and shame that patriarchy places on sexuality.

In SLUT, Fidler challenges the conventional narrative surrounding casual sex and demands that the patriarchal scripts of hook-up culture be re-written.

Utilizing her background as a cabaret performer, Fidler employs both comedic flair and emotional depth to critically engage with delicate topics. She celebrates the power of sex while refusing to elevate it to sacrosanct divinity, aiming to liberate audiences from the constraints of patriarchal ideology and internalized misogyny.

Happy Days

Oh this is going to be another happy day!” – Winnie

Under a mute sky of blazing light; Winnie, sunk to her waist in a mound of sand, and her husband Willie, mostly immobile in a cave behind her, attempt to cope with their doomed situation.

Winnie, “a bird with oil on her feathers“, as Beckett once described her, is woken by a bell “piercingly sharp like a knife“ that ignites her daily survival routine and quest to engage Willie with every aspect of it. Winnie‘s insatiable need for human connection and Willie’s unwillingness or inability to answer it, contribute to their “nec cum te and nec sine te” / “neither with you nor without you” bond, full of tragicomic moments, culminating in an ambiguous surprise once Winnie is neck-deep in the sand.

Happy Days first premiered in 1961 in New York and has since then unquestionably become a classic of the modern stage. In 2022, The Independent named it one of the 40 best plays of all time. More than six decades later, Beckett’s darkly comic vision of the apocalypse and the banality that comes after remains as timely as the day he wrote it.

Walter Asmus collaborated with Samuel Beckett on numerous theater and television productions from 1974 until the author’s death in 1989. He has directed all of Samuel Beckett’s plays internationally. His 1991 production of Waiting for Godot at Dublin’s Gate Theatre was revived multiple times, toured internationally until as late as 2008 and was accepted by critics and academics alike as “definitive”.

The role of Winnie is played by Berlin-based Irish actor Mary Kelly. Mary has performed extensively in Ireland, including at the Gate Theatre, and in Germany most regularly at English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center.

The role of Willie is played by Tomas Spencer, who began his career at ETB | IPAC in the early 2000s and has gone on to appear in numerous films and television programs, including The Last Station, Nymphomaniac and Passport To Freedom.

etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center