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S.O.A.R. Study of a Rice Queen

THE LAB: the very first public presentation of work-in-progress by Ming Poon, in collaboration with the Berliner Förderprogramm Künstlerische Forschung (2022-2023).

“This is part of my ongoing artistic research on developing performance strategies to decolonize my body and its representation as an Asian person within the European hegemony. In S.O.A.R. Queen, I turn my research focus on my queer Asian body. Western queer culture and theory are overwhelmingly used as the point of reference in mainstream discourse and understanding of queerness, whitewashing the queer expressions of other cultures. I see this as a form of cultural colonization. As an expansionist project, colonialism is as much about occupying foreign territories, as it is about appropriating culturally-othered bodies and erasing their cultural contexts, histories and knowledge.

In this research, my aim is to develop performance strategies to decolonize queerness through the use of drag as a tool to challenge and de-center the hegemonic west-centric notion of queerness, as well as, disrupt the heteropatriarchal norms in Chinese culture. The task is to construct conceptual prototypes for a decolonial and anti-patriarchal drag, which takes its central reference from the male-to-female impersonation in Chinese opera called Nan Dan (男旦).

S.O.A.R. Queen is supported by the Berliner Förderprogramm Künstlerische Forschung (2022-23). Over a period of 2 years, I work with the 3 archetypal female roles that are most celebrated in Chinese opera: 1) the warrior, 2) the lover and 3) the concubine. This first phase of the research is dedicated to the female warrior: Mulan (花木兰).”

– Ming Poon

Followed by a post-performance discussion

The Berlin Diaries

The great-grandfather of Oregon Book Award-winning playwright Andrea Stolowitz kept a journal for his descendants after escaping to New York City in 1939 as a German Jew.

Following the complicated lure of genealogy, Stolowitz goes back to Berlin to bring the story of her unknown ancestors out of the archives into the light. The record keeps as many secrets as it shares; how do people become verschollen, lost, like library books?

A limited number of free tickets have been reserved for student groups and their teachers. Please register as soon as possible by email at tickets@etberlin.de

Complete funding for this production has been generously provided by the U.S. Embassy in Berlin.

Andrea Stolowitz is a German/American playwright currently living and working in Cork, Ireland. Her work embraces bold theatricality ranging from intimate portrayals of the human condition to the intersection of national history on private lives. Andrea is a member of New Dramatists class of 2026, an alumna of The Playwrights’ Center, and a collaborating writer with the internationally lauded devised theater company Hand2Mouth Theatre. Andrea is the Lacroute Playwright-in-Residence at Artists Repertory Theater. Andrea has taught at Duke University, NYU, UC-San Diego, Willamette University and NUI-Galway.

Back Home

THE LAB: Artist and Audience Development

Rule of Three Collective are together again. For the first time since March 2020.

In the meantime, we’ve spent hours and hours at home; working for money, working out, working out our social lives, working without being paid for it, working on better sleep. How has this time changed our ideas of home? What do we need in order to feel at home? What else can be a home apart from the physical space we live in? And what happens when three performers finally come back to a space they haven’t been to in a while – a theater?

During the residency at ETB | IPAC, Rule of Three Collective will re-embark on an open journey towards notions of home and share some of the findings at the end of the week. Join us back home!

Followed by a post-performance discussion

Exotic Animal (Live)

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” – Audre Lorde

Exotic is warm and spicy. It is one letter away from erotic. It promises adventure. Exotic is somewhere far away and foreign. Exotic is strange, but also very appealing and desirable. It is always over there, not here; them, not us; you, never me. Exotic is dark and mysterious, but its threat is tamed and contained.

The exotic industry has become a big and lucrative market, offering goods and services ranging from food, fashion, music, books, health products, workshops, collectibles, antiques to cultural attractions, theme events, tourism and corporate branding. It has often been touted as a fun and light way to promote the appreciation and experience of foreign cultures. But is it as innocent as it appears? What lurks beneath its foreigner-friendly surface? This collaborative performance invites the audience to see what it takes to create the ideal exotic look.

Drawing on his personal experience as a dancer of Asian origin, Ming Poon looks at how eurocentrism, globalization and cultural consumerism contribute to the exoticization of his body for the art market. Approaching the body as a site on which meanings, values and boundaries are inscribed, he interrogates how the exotic gaze displaces and appropriates his body, turning it into a cultural commodity and a symbol of subjugation. Exotic Animal both invites and confronts the exotic gaze. Staring defiantly back, it attempts to shift the power relation between the gazer and itself.

Warning: This performance contains cultural stereotypes and the white/racialized gaze.

Ming Poon is a Berlin-based choreographer who began his career as professional dancer in 1993 and started to develop his choreographic practice in 2010. He creates choreographic interventions, where spectators are invited to exercise their agency to create change. His works are interactive and collaborative in design. They usually take the form of collaborative performances, public interventions and one-to-one encounters. He works with vulnerability, care, peripherality and failure as performance strategy.

His practice is influenced by Buddhist concept of interdependence and care, Judith Butler’s resistance in vulnerability, Augusto Boal’s theater of the oppressed and Nicolas Bourriaud’s micro-utopias.

His works have been presented at Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay (Singapore), The Substation (Singapore), English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center (Berlin, Germany), Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin, Germany), Scenario Pubblico | Centro Nazionale di Produzione della Danza (Catania, Italy) and Südpol (Luzern, Switzerland).

This Gentle Moment

Hi Absalon,
in the cell,
in Tokyo or Paris?
you scream (at me)
I scream (at you)
we stay apart
we, meaning you
meaning gone
too
fast

With This Gentle Moment, I am creating a duet film for two performers built on the materialization and physicalization of encounters around queer lived experiences. In directing my attention to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, I want to set off on a choreographic reflection on living in and with a pandemic at a time when our society as a whole has been gripped by one anew.

This Gentle Moment is the first of a series of three works that are inspired by visual artists who passed away from HIV/AIDS. As a choreographer, I am negotiating the essence of their artwork from the perspective of contemporary dance. This Gentle Moment is a homage to Meir Eshel Absalon’s work Proposal for a Habitat. We built and inhabited spaces in which we ask for the relationship between queer (social) bodies and places to experiment with isolation and its resonance. (Nitsan Margaliot)

This Gentle Moment is supported by the NATIONAL PERFORMANCE NETWORK – STEPPING OUT, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the framework of the initiative NEUSTART KULTUR. Assistance Program for Dance.

Army of Lovefuckers

We will kill you with a fucking piece of performance art

We are arming ourselves – internally and externally. Theater is our boot camp.

Packing explosives, puppets and projections, we set off down the path of the female warrior.

We envisage performance as a continuation of politics with adapted techniques and we are recruiting all female fighters who have gotten lost along the way: the time to rise up is now! Join the Army of Lovefuckers!

Lovefuckers are on a journey toward an effective yet bloodless technique for revolution that ties games, fantasy, reality and utopia together. The stage is a guerilla boot camp with futuristic elements where a female recruit is trained to join the Army of Lovefuckers by learning the pluralistic battle of becoming a societally aware performer. She demonstrates her fitness level, chooses role models, builds resilience and, over the course of specialized training, becomes intimately acquainted with her weapon: puppet theater. She discovers her personal puppet and enters into symbiosis with her. Unified as one, the puppet and the puppeteer voice their demands and follow the paths of their role models, such as the feministic cyborg theorist Donna Haraway or the Mexican freedom fighter Subcomandante Marcos, into a playful battle against repression.

Everyone in the audience is invited to join, provided they meet at least one of the recruitment criteria on the application form, which will be distributed before the performance.

A multimedia political show in between theater, dance, performance and puppet theater with ambivalence consciously factored in. The performance elaborates on warfare, the transformation of recruits into heartless killing machines, rebellion against social oppression and the presence of violence in the media. It is a piece that opposes the brutality of the world, thus combatting the paralyzing fears caused by ongoing and unending wars, the predominance of neoliberalism and global terrorism with irony and playfulness.

Or, to sum things up, it is a solo performance tackling serious themes using humorous means.

The Land of Milk(y) and Honey? Digital Edition

everything you ever wanted to know about being Israeli in berlin

but were afraid to ask…

Join us for a very special one-night-only experiment on December 1st at 8pm Berlin time for a completely digital adaptation of The Land of Milk(y) and Honey?: Israelis in Berlin.

Thanks to a generous grant from Fonds Darstellende Künste, we are reenvisioning our intimate dinner party performance as a Zoom conference to be enjoyed from the comfort of your living room. Bring your dancing shoes, a container of pudding and your curiosity with you; this is not TV theater; our intrepid performers will join us from three different countries, connected via the world wide web. Interaction is possible but never imposed.

The performance text was created from transcripts of interviews with 60 Israelis in Berlin – Jewish, Muslim, Arab, secular, straight, queer, those that eschew all labels and everything in between.

To fully participate in this performance, all audience members are asked to bring a single-serving container of pudding, one whole lemon, freshly ground pepper and four fresh mint leaves.

“I pity those who no longer remember the Holocaust and abandon Israel for a pudding.”

This statement, made by Yair Shamir, then Israeli Minister of Agriculture, to the Jerusalem Post in October of 2014, marked the climax of the so-called “Milky protest”. In a post that launched a thousand ships, the Facebook page Olim L’Berlin (Aliyah to Berlin) urged Israelis to move to Berlin due to a markedly cheaper cost of living. The primary evidence? Aldi’s Dessertcreme & Sahne, a dessert comparable to Milky, the dominant pudding brand in Israel, sold for less than a third of the price. This Facebook post received more than one million likes within four days and created headlines around the globe.

Nearly 75 years after the end of the Second World War, Berlin’s Israeli community is estimated to number in the tens of thousands and impossible to verify due to issues of multiple citizenship. Is Berlin truly this promised land of milk and honey? Are people from Israel really immigrating here only because of the standard of living, nightlife and Berlin’s fabled cultural reputation? What about those Israelis who leave the country due to the current political climate? And what affects do 20th century history as well as multiple reports of rising antisemitism have on emigration from Israel to Germany?

Three Israeli performers explore these questions using verbatim text from 60 interviews with the widest possible spectrum of partners; Israelis with an active religious background, Israeli Arabs, highly politicized Israelis as well as Israelis who have absolutely no interest in politics.

The ID Festival is funded by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Szloma-Albam Foundation and KIgA e.V. – Kreuzberger Initiative gegen Antisemitismus

Where Are The Animals?

All the clubs were closed and the structures that protected us had vanished. ANALI GOLDBERG, the most celebrated divine techno goddess in Berlin’s club scene was out of work and had to wear a mask.

With so much free time on her hands, ANALI GOLDBERG decided to start a new QUEER NARRATIVE REVOLUTION (since the old one sucked)!!!

As part of a new trilogy, WHERE ARE THE ANIMALS is an outrageous musical evening of queer oral history. Using highly original and creative storytelling, ANALI GOLDBERG blurs the line between fictitious genealogy and autobiographical comedy.

Join the infamous ANALI GOLDBERG and her entourage to feel closer to yourself!

In cooperation with the ID Festival and made possible through funds from Bezirksamt Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg

Fiasko

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” – Samuel Beckett.

Fiasko is a work-in-progress performance by the Latin American-European collective ABA NAIA as part of THE LAB, the new work development program of English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center. The collective invites the audience to a radicalized idea of failure that ties into contemporary conversations. It is a comical and humorous disruption of the expectations of theater. In Fiasko, the ambivalence and power relations of comedy are explicitly portrayed through performative failure.

The pandemic condemns us to failure at all ends, slows us down and makes us fall into despair. We have taken a close look at the miseries of our time and developed strategies of disrupting, sabotaging and corrupting the expected way of being on stage. All the way to the Grande Fiasko!

Fiasko started as a performative research funded by the 2021 #TakeCare program of Fonds Darstellende Künste.

Please note that tickets are extremely limited due to the current health and safety regulations. We encourage guests to secure their tickets as soon as possible.

To attend the performance, you must wear an FFP2 mask and present a negative antigen quick test for COVID-19 that is not older than 24 hours or proof of your complete vaccination or recovery from COVID-19. Please book a test date in advance from an official test center, e.g. www.test-to-go-berlin. Please observe our health and safety measures.

Zugang mit FFP2-Maske und aktuellem negativen Antigen-Schnelltest (nicht älter als 24 Stunden) oder Nachweis des vollständigen Impfschutzes bzw. der Genesung. Bitte buchen Sie vorab eigenständig Ihren verbindlichen Testtermin bei einem offiziellen Testzentrum, bspw. über www.test-to-go.berlin. Bitte beachten Sie unsere Hygiene- und Schutzmaßnahmen.

HomeWork

When activists are forced to scatter and to connect through their mobile phones and laptops, who among them knows what is really going on? Who possesses the truth and do values change according to where they are? How do fear, imagination, ambition and lies shape the truth?

HomeWork is a play about activism versus corruption. It is about activists who never stop working, and corrupt people who never stop working as well. Every place becomes home. Activists want to change the political status of their homeland while brutal authorities drive them to change. Corruption tries to find ways to survive these changes and benefit from them.

The play tells the story of a girl who is an activist. She is stuck alone in a city she does not really know and then she meets a corrupt man. She lies all the time and he believes her. He tells the truth all the time but she does not believe him.

How can choices be made?

Please note that tickets are extremely limited due to the current health and safety regulations. We encourage guests to purchase their tickets as soon as possible.

HomeWork is a production by Barzakh in cooperation with English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center, supported by: Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Program: NEW START CULTURE #TakeAction & Stiftung Preußische Seehandlung.