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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.

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 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.

Cool Aid

a cover version of the greatest comedy ever

Katherine and Audrey rent out a garden apartment. Only to artists, though. This has earned them a very impressive art collection. They love art, galleries, openings. Their brother, who thinks he’s Erich Honecker, will probably have to go to an institution because he won’t leave his room anymore. He will be greatly missed, because he buries the corpses in the cellar when his sisters have poisoned another one of those sad characters – There is nothing sadder than failed artists.

Katherine: “It was so sad to see a young artist die. And then we came to the conclusion that there really is nothing sadder in this world than an artist who suffers from a lack of success, who goes nowhere with all their ambitions but down the drain”
Audrey: “And we thought it would be better they didn´t have to live through all that pain and misunderstanding and pain again. So we helped them.”

Then her nephew Max shows up with Dr. Graveline. They are on the run and have the body from their last murder with them in the trunk. The burial ground in the basement comes in handy. Things get complicated ….

Cool Aid is a lurid farce about the dangerous edges of the contemporary art business, where the abyss is always lurking and only those who “make it” are immune from the crash.

Audrey: The last sad batch of Minimalism.
Katherine: Imitators only.
Audrey: A bunch of fucking wankers.

Cool Aid is a contemporary cover version of the best of all comedies, Arsenic and Old Lace from 1941.

 

Islands

“Paradise is an island. So is hell.”

 (Judith Schalansky, The Atlas of Remote Islands)

Sail away, sail away, sail away…is there anyone who hasn’t been dreaming of that for the last year and a half? Landing on a tropical island far from everyday cares, the news and possibly the pandemic? Inspired by several islands far away and close by, known and unknown, real and metaphorical, a crew of international artists invite the audience to join them on a journey to islands all over the world, from the middle of the deep blue sea to the four walls of our own homes.

Islands have always and continued to serve as the focus of deeply contradictory imaginations fueling both utopian fantasies as well as colonial and imperial greed. The multimedia performance Islands invites audiences to walk the fine line between them.

In Islands, a diverse ensemble of artists come together to share their biographies, marked by migration and exploration and thus full of island stories, with each other as well as the audience.

After the successful coproduction of Stuck in Orbit (2019), Islands is the second cooperation of Post Theater with English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center. Post Theater is a media-theater company that fuses research with the biographic background of their changing casts. Post Theater has worked in more than 20 countries around the world, also including a number of island nations.

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.

Exotic Animal

Exotic Animal is an online audience collaborative performance that takes place via the platform Zoom.

“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.

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 theatre 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).

2020 EXP(L)O(RE) – Evening 2

A JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY
This format and is dedicated to newcomers, shorter performances and work-in-progress. This year, we are offering four performances over two evenings.

I AM EVERYBODY, I AM EVERY BODY | Performance (8:00 pm)

Written, Directed and Performed by Marque-Lin (USA) | Sound, Video and Stage Design by B_No_Source [live] (Germany) | Choreography by Ly Nguyen (Germany/Vietnam) | Costume Design by Jessika Strauck (USA/Germany/Paraguay)

I Am Everybody, I Am Every Body is an experimental performance and audio-visual piece that traces a fractured semiautobiography of MARQUE-Lin as a daughter of Vietnamese refugees. Using extractions from her life as footage and material, B_No_Source [live] will modulate and rearrange MARQUE-Lin’s voice live on stage, transforming her into <s*he> – a nation- less AI-produced female entity that has decided to finally investigate the systems and networks that have created her in search of her point of origin and subsequently her purpose in living an existence of such ambiguity and suffering.

Questions of nationhood, inter-generational inheritance, historical and personal trauma skip and glitch as <s*he> questions the pervasive sense of unrest and constant malfunctions happening in her body. Something is calling her from the edge of her self-understanding. From within the black box—a space where unknown codes and hidden layers categorize and determine – her identity emerges. Where does <s*he> begin? Which systems are complicit in the creation of immigrational identity? How much of our digital networks represent our own hidden prejudices? Is there an escape? PRESS START.

DDS! Discipline, Dominance, Submission | Interdisciplinary Performance (9:00 pm)

Direction and Dramaturgy by Derya Durmaz (Turkey/Germany) | Audiovisual Direction by Özlem Sariyildiz (Turkey/Germany) Performered by Derya Durmaz & Michael(a) Daoud (Syria/Germany) | Assistant Direction by Bora Yediel (Turkey/Germany) | Graphic Artwork by Turgut Kocaman (Turkey/Germany)

Pain and pleasure. Giving in and giving up. Playing and roleplaying. Do you play your part? Did you write your part? Or were you given your part? Was it consensual? Or were you conned? Was it at least sensual? Is it time to come to your senses? Maybe then you can finally make sense of it all…

DDS! Discipline, Dominance, Submission is an interdisciplinary performance project that takes a close and intimate look at how much of an understanding we really have of our (chosen or given) gender roles and the parts we play.

 

 

 

The White Plague: A Binaural Play

An immersive binaural experience developed from the play The White Plague (created in 2017 and performed in UK and Greece) as a response to the health & safety restrictions imposed in theaters during COVID19.

10 years have passed since a fiercely contagious virus spread among a major city’s population, causing a mysterious white blindness and eventually, society’s collapse. Now five survivors come forward to tell a story they were not allowed to share before. A story of unprepared quarantine facilities and dehumanizing circumstances that drive citizens to expose the very brightest and darkest aspects of their human nature. A story of government negligence, police violence and persevering humanity.

This binaural experience places the audience in the middle of the action as a state-of-the-art sound design transports them to every location of the play and inside every character’s head. A starting point to explore social coherence, gender roles and the survival instincts of a society in crisis.

Noose

… is that day in your life when you see it…

the time slips away…

and all you live is not what you have wished

is the moment when your whole world is shattered

that very moment when your dreams come back asking for all you promised

when you feel it…

the noose is moving up…further and further…it is tightening around your throat…stealing your air…stealing your breath

…because until then you thought you were alive.

A surrealistic performance somewhere in between black comedy and the theater of the absurd. With the use of tabletop puppets and cinematic narration, the puppeteers animate the puppets without being visible to the audience.

2020 EXP(L)O(RE) – Evening 1

A JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY
This format and is dedicated to newcomers, shorter performances and work-in-progress. This year, we are offering four performances over two evenings.

MILKTOOTH | Performance (8:00 pm)

Created and Performed by Promona Sengupta (India)

In the not-so-distant future, when interplanetary travel, collaboration and governance is the established order of the day, a young woman on Earth, turning 30, decides to fill the emotional void in her single life by taking part in the intergalactic adoption scheme and becoming a single mom. The catch – her newborn adoptee is a gigantic extraterrestrial child who Earth-dwellers would simply refuse to accept. As they grow old together, mother and child find tenuous ways of communicating, loving, caring and intimacy that take the world by shock and raise violent alarm bells everywhere from the Kita to the playground, until a terrified neighbor calls the authorities.

This is the story of a young single mom trying to save her special-needs-child from being taken away by the intergalactic child services, all the while attempting to love someone who does not fit into the human definition of “lovable”.

 

 

 

 

THE HORROR WOMAN A.K.A. TOO DARK … TOO SWEET … TOO DEAD? | Dance Film (9:00 pm)

Choreographed and Performed by GᾹZ collective a.k.a. Noga Abramovitch (Israel), Helen Burghardt (Germany) and Zoe Goldstein (United Kingdom)
Sitting in a darkened movie theater, hunched up, limbs knotted, hands over faces, three friends wonder how it is that they happen to be seeing yet another horror movie together. It’s that fine, intriguing line between fear-horror-pleasure. This shared visceral experience also raises questions: what’s up with women in horror films? All those beautified helpless victims and sirens with dark powers. Who created them and through whose eyes are we watching? How do we connect, and to what, when these female archetypes bleed across the screen? An unlikely and frightening adventure ensues.

The Horror Woman a.k.a too dark … too sweet … too dead? is a dance horror piece, exploring feminine archetypes and expressions of femininity in horror, the female gaze in horror as well as the translation and transitions between cinematic and stage languages.

The Horror Woman a.k.a. too dark … too sweet … too dead? was developed with support from ADA Studios and Theaterhaus Berlin Mitte.