Producing Series | Production Series | English Theatre Berlin

Blog Archive

2019 EXP(L)O(RE)

A JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY
This format opens the festival and is dedicated to newcomers, shorter performances and work-in-progress. Spend an entire afternoon taking in seven different performances. In between the performances, you can enjoy fantastic food, luxurious libations and magnificent music by international, Berlin-based musicians. Performances start at 2pm and we open our doors at 1pm.

POSEUR | Performance (2pm)

Directed by Frederika Tsai (Taiwan/ Germany), Written and Performed by Lena Chen (USA/Germany), Music by Alex Weber (Germany), Illustration and Animation by Lucas Paixão (Brazil), Video Design by Effie Wu (Taiwan/Germany), Photography by Edward Isais (USA)

Do you like to watch or be watched? She enjoys the feeling of your gaze upon her. Elle Peril is a con artist. Elle Peril is an identity crisis. Elle Peril is the truest lie she ever told.

When a girl from the United States falls victim to a heinous crime, she impulsively moves to Berlin and invents a fictional life to cope with the traumatic consequences.

Inspired by the autobiographic experiences of performance artist and poet Lena Chen, Poseur explores the power andthe peril of living as a woman in the public gaze.

Supported by the Taipei Representative Office in the Federal Republic of Germany and The Tsai Foundation, Boston

THE INTERVENTION OF LONELINESS | Interactive Performance (2:45pm)

Concept and Performance by Ming Poon (Singapore/The Netherlands), Photography by Olivia Kwok (Singapore)

We have entered the age of loneliness. Social media, modern work ethics and urban lifestyles all contribute to a system that exposes us to loneliness on a regular basis and on a global scale.

This interactive performance invites the audience to create a space for loneliness to take place. Can we transform loneliness from a place of suffering to become a source of strength?

TEXT ROULETTE | Interactive Performance (3:30 pm)

Created and Performed by Finn O’Branagáin (Australia), Operator Bronwyn Miller (Australia), Design by Clare Testoni (Australia), Composed by Tom Hogan (Australia), Sound Design by Nathan Jamieson (Australia), Dramaturgy by Alexa Taylor (Australia), Photography by David Cox (Australia)

It’s hard to know what to say sometimes. Is there a message you need to send?

Maybe you need to tell your crush you can’t stop thinking about them, tell your roommate their sexy role-playing is way too loud, or tell your mom you hate her new tattoo.

If you can’t find the words, play Text Roulette and let Finn O’Branagáin draft them for you – then choose to send, save, delete or ask for a
sign. Sign up to participate or watch it unfold from the safety of the audience.

BANANA PRIDE™ | Theater (4:15 pm)

Directed and Performed by Kysy Fischer (Brazil), Dramaturgy and Performed by Zero Pilnik (Brazil), Performed by Teija Vaittinen (Finland), Performed by Rafuska Marks (Brazil), Devised by ABA NAIA and Paola Pilnik, Scenography by Inga Aleknaviciute (Lithuania), Lighting Design by Thais Nepomuceno (Brazil), Photography by Mari Vass (Brazil)

Banana Pride™ is a party. It’s an exaggeration. It’s an exaggerated party. It’s a farce with hints of music, dance, clichés, and stereotypes. It’s a soap opera. It’s a cabaret night. It’s a glamorous tragedy. It’s a job interview. It’s a provocation. It’s a political act, a feminist act, a celebration, a carnival night. Banana Pride™ is a manifesto.

SOLAR THRESHOLD| Dance Performance (5pm)

Concept and Performance by Maque Pereyra (Bolivia), Costume Design by Paola Bascón (Bolivia) and Maque Pereyra, Sound Design by Mars Dietz (USA), Dramaturgical Support by Verena Melgarejo (Germany/Bolivia), Lighting Design by Hanna Kritten Tangsoo (Estonia/Germany), Drawing by Lucia Ramirez (Bolivia), Photography by Gisela Zárate (Colombia)

Solar Threshold fosters the idea of pleasure, sensuality and spirituality as tools for decolonizing bodies. The vibrations of the voice create a temple of sounds and movement that merges the notions of pleasure, sensuality and spirituality. Ritual chanting is interwoven with reggaeton to generate liminal spaces where new bodies/entities/identities appear.

SALVATION (GLITTER DOESN’T CARE I’M A BOY) | Music Theater (5:45 pm)

Created and Performed by Shlomi Moto Wagner (Israel), Photography by David Beecroft (Germany)

This science fiction drag ritual is 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 re-manifestations 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. All bodies are welcome and audience participation is highly encouraged.

Foreign Body_Trio

Bodies that do not fit within the framework of society are treated as “foreign bodies” and are ultimately rejected.

The choreographer wants to look at society through three such bodies. The unfamiliar physical form that the three bodies create explodes stereotypes about the body.

This performance explores how the audience perceives them and questions the meaning of “foreignness” in our society.

Rays

RAYS is an immersive experience, dedicated to the latent nervousness that increasingly permeates our existence. It strives to make visible what usually evades our senses: Wi-Fi signals, the electromagnetic fields of our smart phones, computers and power supply systems…

Working as an antenna, Mirjam Sögner lends her body to these immaterial waves that define the very core of our contemporary existence.

Using no other device than her own organic material, she attempts to receive, detect, synchronize with and amplify these omnipresent signals. She becomes vibration. Vibration becomes body. Energy becomes solid. The line between transmitter and receiver blurs. Will the body eventually dissolve?

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Boxes

Boxes are her work.

Work is her life.

Her life is in boxes.

And they all look just the same.

Living a square life or breaking out of the box? One show, two performers, various techniques, and plenty of absurd situations.

Vacio

Vacio, created by Oskar Mauricio and Cia Omkara, deals with the need to connect the two contrasting worlds we are confronted with today: the digital and the organic world.

Vacio brings together physical theater, aerial dance, live music and visual projections in its attempt to forge this connection.

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Please, Repeat After Me

I have millions of reasons to be crazy; give me one reason to be sane!

Please, Repeat After Me is a play about decision-making and labels.

(We)* are left abandoned in the theater with a real mermaid: a fish incapable of being eaten and a woman incapable of seduction.

But the mermaid is real!

When does a stereotype stop being a stereotype?

When does a refugee stop being a refugee?

When does an actor stop being an actor?

Harrende Räume und Trotzende Menschen

“When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it’s tender and pliant. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions.” Andrej Tarkovsky, Stalker, USSR, 1979

In this performance, three dancers and a beatboxer make the struggle against the adversities of a paralyzing world physically tangible. The piece questions of the relationship between physical and mental forces as well as how human beings bundle their strengths in order to move beyond their own limits.

The combination of martial arts, krump, dance, live sounds and the given as well as sculpted space create a dense atmosphere and images for which each audience member creates their own contexts, evoking memories of one’s own physical condition and experiences.

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Stuck In Orbit

A Space Drama | A Science FACTion Tale

Imagine: You were launched into space at the height of the Cold War – 30 years ago. Your space station is a secret collaboration with your archenemy. Then the Iron Curtain fell and your space agencies conveniently forgot about you and your co-commander from the opposite side. The two of you have struggled for mental and physical survival ever since.

Theater, visual art and sound design meet in this intense exploration of outer and inner space.

post theater has created a situation in which the politics and psychology of the 20th century’s former East and former West, pessimism and optimism, meet in the form of two juxtaposed characters. The fictitious international space station PACE becomes a battleground of philosophies and beliefs. .

For many years, post theater has been working on post-documentary performances, blending intense research with fiction. Stuck in Orbit follows a series of reflections of Soviet era utopianism. The space race, at the height of the Cold War, was a combination of soft power diplomacy and military threat. Not too long ago, this felt nearly anachronistic. Currently, with raising nationalism and the emerging superpower China, this has gained a strange sense of contemporariness. Space has again become a battleground for geopolitical conflicts.

Stuck in Orbit is post theater’s first collaboration with ETB | IPAC. It is performed in English with German subtitles.

Post-performance discussions will be offered on May 10 with Johannes Weppler, a space aviation expert of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Luft- und Raumfahrt and on May 11 and May 16 with the artists of the production.

post theater is an interdisciplinary performing arts unit without an ensemble. Projects range from theater to dance, multimedia performances to installations. Reoccurring themes are identity, resources and technology. The creative, haptic and original usage of video projections is a key component to the company’s work. post theater was founded in 1999 in New York, moved its headquarters to Berlin in 2002, opened a Tokyo branch in 2005 and one in Stuttgart in 2010. post theater has presented more than 50 works at festivals and arts institutions in 50 cities in 20 countries (e.g. Bangkok, Barcelona, Belgrade, Berlin, Cologne, Ljubljana, Milan, Munich, New York, Salamanca, Singapore, Seoul, Taipei, Tokyo, Vienna, Yokohama, Zagreb, Zurich). Hiroko Tanahashi and Max Schumacher are the artistic co-directors. In addition to the artistic work, post theater also gives lectures and workshops at art institutions and universities worldwide. post theater has won many awards, for example the Bremer Autorenpreis (2004 & 2011) and the Stuttgart Theater Award (2015 & 2017).

The Lab: Wer ist Medea?

Wer ist Medea?/ Who is Medea?/ Quem é Medeia?

How can we interpret a classic of dramatic literature in 2019? Why work with classics at all? Let’s go back…to the beginnings…and let’s start with a universally despised woman.

Wer ist Medea? is a music theater performance as well as a spoken word concert, manifesto, choreography, emotional rehearsal, a tragic monologue or maybe just an homage to all those women that are hated just because their stories were written by men.

This performance is the very first presentation of a work-in-progress, the first interaction with an audience. In between the many layers of performance, constructed upon the interpretations of a variety of authors, we work as archaeologists to understand and unearth Medea.

Who is Medea? The personification of one of the most heinous crimes imaginable, a mother who kills her own children? Or the woman who sees her children being murdered by her enemies? The cruel and cold woman that betrayed her own father, the king, killed her brother and abandoned her own country in the name of love? Or a strong and independent woman that serves as an existential threat to patriarchal society? A woman blinded by her thirst of revenge or the victim of an ambitious and unscrupulous man? A mother that in a final act of love chooses to deliver her children to the embrace of death instead of leaving them in the hands of her cruel enemies?

Join us and find out.

An attempt to create a new dramaturgy inspired by the mythological character Medea, herself the subject of a myriad of different authors who wrote about her, reinvented her and imagined her, including Euripides, Heiner Müller, Christa Wolf, Chico Buarque and Paulo Pontes.

Performed in English, German and Portuguese

The Land of Milk(y) and Honey?

Israelis in Berlin

Following completely sold-out initial runs in the fall of 2018 and winter of 2019, we are very pleased to offer these six encore performances.

LIMITED SEATING: Please note that there are only 50 tickets available for each performance!

“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