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Berlin International Performing Arts Center

Blog Archive

2017 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 twelve performances on stage, in dressing rooms and all around the theater. 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.

 

AHNENAMT/MINISTRY FOR ANCESTORS by Club Real (Austria)

This long-term project about a new aesthetic practice of elective kinship is a scenic installation – a parallel reality which needs to be entered by visitors to come to life. It examines a new cultural practice: the possibility to adopt an ancestor.

 

 

 

 

CARLOS WHISPER by Katie Lee Dunbar (UK)

A one-on-one performance in which individual audience members are whisked off into a sonic wonderland, all centered around a table of seemingly random objects. The connections are only made clear once you put the headphones on.

 

 

 

 

EPILOGUE by Noemi Berkowitz (USA/Poland)

What might life after death look like… and what implications would that have for life before death? In this two-woman play, a girl finds pieces of herself in stories from across the world and across time. A performance about the ways we develop in our journeys forward.

 

 

 

 

HYO (효) by Haenny Park (South Korea)

This piece was inspired by a famous Korean folktale, very often told to the artist by her father as a child. It tells the story of a son who digs up a grave to steal a human leg, which he will use to save his dying mother.

 

 

 

 

I DON’T WEAR SKIRTS BECAUSE I NEVER LEARNED TO CROSS MY LEGS by Angela Millano (Spain)

This performance is a protest against the normalization, legislation and control of our bodies and the need to fulfill standards perceived as natural. It is a rebellion by a vulnerable and violent body that feels beyond the social, professional and personal limitations imposed on it.

 

 

 

 

INTIMATE ARSENAL (A QUARTET) by Claudia Grigg Edo (UK/Catalonia)

Sit down at the table. On the other side of the table is HER. Stay with her as she navigates one of four situations. If you like, you can watch it loop round again in this interactive video projection.

 

 

 

 

LATENT DREAMS by Katrine Turner (Scotland)

This performance is about the Apocalypse. About the rising sea waters, and the invisible plagues. About when Cillian wakes up from his coma, and there’s no one about so he breaks into a vending machine for a can of Coke. About the futures we allow ourselves to envision.

 

 

 

 

MOUTH CONTROL by MILK (USA)

Sometimes it’s easier to be honest when no one is around. We are more open in text messages and status updates than we are in face-to-face interactions with others. In Mouth Control, we ask the audience to test the limitations of distance and vulnerability in real time. We invite you to play a game with us.

 

 

 

 

SKEWED by Shanti Suki Osman (UK)

A solo performance using song, storytelling and sound. Using live and prerecorded voice and field recordings, Shanti
Suki Osman presents 4 songs documenting her exploration of self-fetishization as a means for empowerment.

 

 

 

 

SWEETS FOR A STORY by Bees Knees Sweets (Canada)

An exploration of connecting with strangers and their stories using food as a catalyst. Food is universal. It’s something we all want and need as human beings, and therefore is something that unites us as people. Food can tell our stories, as well as inspire them.

 

 

 

 

THE FOURTH UNITY by Renen Itzhaki (Israel)

A room. A bookshelf. A small group of people. They walk in circles. They are all one. They read a book. Sometimes out loud. Sometimes they stop. Sometimes a memory.

 

 

 

 

THE WHEEL by Connecting Fingers (UK/Italy)

From the script by philosopher Sara Fortuna, inspired by Dogville from Lars von Trier, four dancers explore a circular conceptual space organized in several steps in this work-in-progess showing: sleep/pre-birth/origin, child-like openness to the adult world in its tensions, contradictions, competitions, failures and eventual coming back to the starting point.

Clowns’ Houses

Puppet theater for adults by Merlin Puppet Theatre

One building, five apartments, six characters. The audience watches them live their conventional lives in a dark, claustrophobic setting, with their fears, obsessions and loneliness.

Merlin Puppet Theatre dramatizes and demonizes their obsessions until they finally punish and liberate them in the most violent manner. They do not attempt to do existential analysis through their work. Instead, they examine modern way of living in its current form. The loneliness of modern humanity is displayed through the dark rooms of Clowns’ Houses; prison-like houses, people trapped in their routines and habits, far from their dreams.

L’ART ET LA MANIÈRE and PLANTING MEMORIES

Two dance theater performances

L’art et la manière explores the relationship between everyday movements and artistic actions in an engaging, fun and critical way. Through this this interactive dialogue with the audience, Marie questions her identity as an interpreter, a woman and the role artists have in society.

Planting Memories is a dance duet that explores the concepts of personal space and identity. Drawing inspiration from their own lives, Marie and Paula relate personal memories through text and images. By plunging into a surreal world, this piece guides the audience through a personal journey in which the unfolding of the past enables the present.

Shlomo’s Friends

Every immigrant has to form new relationships.

So did Shlomo Lieberman when he came to Berlin.

In this performance, he invites new friends to present ancient texts related to his name twin, King Solomon. These texts deal with love, desire, decency, morality and posing disturbing questions about the meaning of life.

Friends are asked to choose from these texts, to perform them as they see fit and to offer a new understanding of them. The mission is to create a new emotional landscape on the background of an old one in which people can become friends.

MEME – I See Ah!

About the moment in which ANYthing becomes SOMEthing and again something ELSE.

When do we think as spectators that we understood something (I see. Ah!)? When does this kind of understanding manifests itself in a fixed notion, a clichéd image of the (yet still unknown) Other and its “traditional” performing arts? When does our gaze even claim the seen as general knowledge about the Other (Asia!)? What kind of gap exists between the seen (I see. Ah!) and the claimed (Asia!)?

This stream of questions came up when Hyunsin, initially trained in Western Contemporary Dance and Theater, started to learn Traditional Korean Dance, a dance form which builds a different body on stage than the Western counterpart she was familiar with.

Out of the Dark

A meditation on freedom, loss and grief

The artistic duo BirdMoon – Stephen Mooney and Dorothy Bird – invite artists Aude Gouaux Langlois, Nadine Milzner, Natasha Jaffe and Michael Haeflinger to join an artistic interdisciplinary and interactive “conversation” by means of music, dance, poetry, visuals and soundscape.

The performance piece Out of the Dark explores the desire to escape from darkness, both physical and mental, and its propensity to linger and echo into the light as repetition or distortion of memory. Within these loose parameters, the artists work to create clarity out of chaos, harmony out of passion and create light within the dark.

Lauta

A physical exploration of the hysterical joys and melancholia of youth

What adolescent events, personally and politically, shape the performance of gender as 20-somethings? At a young age, dance artists Aliina Lindroos and Susie Yugler were both called lautas (or ironing board, i.e., “she’s flat as a board [lauta]”).

LAUTA aims to understand how childhood heartbreak, trauma and loss echo in the body. The work investigates the female gaze and the implications of a feminized body in multiple modes of performance.

The Face Reality Deserves

A performance about memory or the lack of it

“Sometimes I feel this planet is nothing but a giant loop machine. Going ‘round and ‘round and around we go. And here we are, going ‘round, doing the same old stupid things, over and over again. In love, relationships, in politics, with our thoughts, with our beliefs, with fashion…”

#Manifesto

“My name is Heidi Blumenfeld and I’m a transnational artist.”

She breaks borders between kitsch and high art, between funny and serious, between masculine and feminine. Her art is her juggling. But how to
make art? How to be an artist in a time when everyone wants to be an artist?

A transdisciplinary performance which puts circus into a theatrical universe, the piece proposes an art manifesto for our era. And at the same time,
however ironic and witty it may be, #Manifesto is also a celebration of art (so that people don’t forget what it’s all about).

Intime Fremde

“When I was a child my mother used to tell me that I am a citizen of the world. Of course I believed her, she was my mother. But the older I got, the more I understood that this was just my mother’s dream.”

This performance by Welcome Project. The Foreigner’s Theatre is dedicated to a reflection on the idea of borders, identity, the concept of nation, and country of origin. The European Union got us used to low-cost travel and making ourselves at home in every country of the EU. Now, the old world is running scared and putting itself on lockdown: the Mediterranean Sea now seems to be made out of barbed wire. Borders exist hidden in plain sight everywhere.