The two performers/choreographers investigate how the relentless drive towards consumption, getting, needing and exploiting of the contemporary Western world plays out in the attitudes and responses of the individual body and mind. In the process, they create a highly physical piece that is also culturally relevant.
Live music, storytelling and body percussion interweave to create a sound-based performance to be watched through the ears. It is inspired by Daniel Veronese’s dramatic poem Ringside, in which women brutally fight for the privilege of having a very unique prize. In the story, this year’s trophy is a bridegroom, the offspring of the union between a female sailor and a shark. From one round to another, the fight gets louder and fiercer, but the prize seems well worth the suffering.
Witnesses carefully follow the fight, blinded by the whiteness of the ring. They beg their children not the look at it, but the children can still listen. They listen to cruelty, they listen to stories.
He’s found the formula for survival, or so he thinks, until one day his friend Rahim mysteriously disappears. When the body turns up charred beyond recognition, Laurence is thrust to the fore of a civil rights movement and is forced to take a closer look at the town he was so ready to call home.
The Most Unsatisfied Town is based on the true story of Oury Jalloh, who was killed in Dessau police custody on January 7, 2005, and the activists of the Initiative in Remembrance of Oury Jalloh, who spurred an international movement to bring his killers to justice. This play is a fictional story about racism, police violence and life in German cities.
The play is performed in English with German subtitles.
The production also features a lobby exhibition exploring Oury Jalloh, other deaths in police custody throughout Europe and related topics as well as two post-performance discussions on March 10 and March 16.
The discussion on March 10 will be moderated by Noa Ha (Migrationsrat Berlin Brandenburg) with special guest Thomas Ndindah (Initiative in Remembrance of Oury Jalloh) and the discussion on March 16 will be moderated by Sharon Dodua Otoo (Witnessed Series) with special guest Canan Bayram (Berlin’s House of Representatives, Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen)
We are also offering school workshops in cooperation with the Initiative in Remembrance of Oury Jalloh. Student matinees can also be arranged with these workshops on March 13, 14, 15 or 16. Please email tickets (at) etberlin.de for more information.
Supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds
Two Works on Death and Dying is an attempt to unearth the psychology and mythology that surround the theme of death. It is told in two parts: And Then She Departed in the Most Secret of Manners, a deeply personal story of loss and The Mandragora and other Beliefs, an intense meditation on the afterlife. The artists invite you to join this cathartic event in the making and to celebrate with them the inevitability of loss, grief, fear, death and our will to survive.
Followed by a post-performance discussion
Jahman Davine is an Australian-born theater maker working between Melbourne, Australia and Berlin, Germany. Having graduated from the National Theatre Drama School, he has also studied the Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki methods with Zen Zen Zo, Australia’s leading physical theater company. Davine’s productions walk a formal tightrope between chaos and order, using philosophy and mythology to investigate themes of social ideology, fantasy and taboo. Often containing little story and void of modern characters, his work seeks to engage the audience’s collective cerebral and physical responses to time, space and causality composition. By counterpointing poetic text, visual art, spatial design, color and light, theme, myth and music to the performers’ bodies, Davine aims to create a total audience experience. In this way, he endeavors to define a new form of performing arts, one which is independent from other art forms to offer the unique possibility of an extraordinary group experience, influenced by the historic human necessity for tragic celebration, ritual and cathartic connection.
Michelle Myers is a Berlin-based writer/performer from Melbourne, Australia. After completing her training at the National Theatre Drama School in 2010, she has worked extensively in theater and film. She worked as a performer/script developer with immersive theater companies Underground Cinema, Secret Squirrel and Little Sister Productions for four years. In 2014 she co-founded TBC, an independent company focused on challenging traditional notions of theatre through unconventional staging and venues. In 2015 she studied at the William Esper Studio in New York. Her recent projects include film The Fiery Escape directed by Mehdi Messouci (MANEKINO – Berlin) and Illusion Woman, a solo performance piece written and directed by Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson for the The Soul Of Money exhibition at DOX Center for Contemporary Art, Prague.
TURI (Turi Agostino) is an Australian-born producer/composer/performer currently based in Berlin. Trained over the last 20 years as a classical pianist and well versed in the world of electronic and ambient sounds, he has worked in the fields of live and studio production, sound design for film and live performance for most of his career. He has toured nationally around Australia with various outfits in a variety of festivals and venues.
A solo piece using text, movement and audio with gentle audience participation.
Followed by a post-performance discussion
Lauren Hart was born in Sheffield, England in 1985. She graduated in 2007 from Central School of Speech and Drama School in London where she trained as a performer. Since graduating she has worked professionally in the independent theater community around Europe performing her own work and collaborating with directors, choreographers (Willi Dorner, Anu Almagro, Andrew Loretto, Neil Bettles and Sarah Duffy) and theater companies (You Me and Bum Bum Train, The Other Way Works and Nodding Dog). She has performed at various venues in the UK (The Crucible, Camden People’s Theatre, Theatre Delicatessen, Arnolfini, Bank Street Arts and Live Art Bistro) and in various site-specific locations throughout Europe. She has performed in the UK, Greece, Norway, Germany and Finland.
She moved to Berlin in 2015 and works as a freelance theater maker and performer. Since arriving in Berlin she has collaborated with Fang Lu on her video art project Ex Lovers and she has performed her one-to-one performance This is Mine. What’s Yours? in the 2016 Expat Expo | Immigrant Invasion Festival at English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Art Center and Theaterhaus Berlin Mitte. Wrought-Sheffield (one-to-one performance Festival, UK) commissioned her to develop and perform a new cross cultural performance I’m not (t)here anymore which uses Skype video call to connect the UK and Germany. The performance was shown as part of the festival in April 2016 in both Berlin and Sheffield.
In September 2016 she was invited to perform This is Mine. What’s Yours? at the Pori Theater Festival in Finland. Follow a collaboration with German artist Dara Friedman, the video poetry project featuring one of her poems will be shown at the gallery Supportico Lopez in spring 2017.
The Expat Expo | Immigrant Invasion: A Showcase of Wahlberliner is an annual festival conceived and curated by Daniel Brunet that debuted in 2013. We put our Miete where our mouth is with this festival featuring our most important resource – the community of international artists and the English-language Freie Szene.
Over six evenings, the Expo features a curated selection of two professional performances per evening on our stage (in every genre imaginable) and on Sunday, April 2, we invite you to ExpLoRE, the format for newcomers, featuring 10 shorter performances and work-in-progress taking place throughout our entire facility, from our stage to our dressing rooms to our breathtaking courtyard.
The 2017 edition of the festival will be held from April 2 – April 8, 2017.
This year, we’re looking to showcase two professional productions by Berlin-based artists each evening from Monday, April 3 through Saturday, April 8. Works should be between approximately 45 and 65 minutes in length.
We can also consider shorter works for performance throughout our facility or courtyard during the day on April 2, 2017.
Learn more about the festival and see the lineup from last year right here! An information sheet with more information is also available here.
Applications for the 2017 Expat Expo are due by midnight on Monday, January 30, 2017 and the complete lineup will be announced on or about February 15, 2017.
Τaking significant contemporary technological advancements as a starting point, the performance deals with the conflict between man and machine. Following a non-linear narrative, the piece depicts a visual journey through space and time, from tribal life to artificial intelligence and virtual reality, which ultimately results in a parable examining the nature of human existence.
Followed by a post-performance discussion in conjunction with Theater Scoutings Berlin!
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More InformationDespina Kapetanaki was born in Athens, Greece and holds a degree in theater studies from the University of Athens as well as a diploma in acting. While living in Dublin, Ireland, she completed a Master’s degree in literary translation at Trinity College and worked as performer and acting instructor. In Dublin she was also introduced to the actor’s psycho-physical and vocal training by Nervousystem Theatre Company. She worked as a drama teacher and actor in Athens from 2009 to 2012.
In April 2012 she was based in Bielefeld, Germany, where in collaboration with Bielefeld University she founded the Experimental Theater Studio. She created and directed various projects with the studio, including site-specific performances. In August 2014, she was invited by Odin Teatret in Denmark to participate in the Odin Week Festival, an international festival for theory and practice which includes an intensive introduction to Odin Teatret’s training and working methods as well as lectures and discussions with the director Eugenio Barba. She has lived and worked in Berlin since 2015. Her piece Politically Correct was presented during the 2016 Berlin Performing Arts Festival.
As a performer, she creates her own projects inspired by daily life and the contemporary sociopolitical situation. Her work is a combination of physical theater, performance and dance. She is interested in performing without using a separate stage, enhancing this way the communication between the audience and the performer.
Shame connects and disconnects. Shame is collective, but isolates. Shame is private and political/public. Shame flows between me and others, past and future, childhood and adulthood. Shame is hiding, shame is control, social and individual control.
The play stages the stories of the actor and contemporary social and politic events.
With masks and puppets, drag and glitter, let’s all shame ourselves!
Followed by a post-performance discussion.
We are very pleased to present this initial public performance of a new work-in-progress by the team who brought Baba to the 2016 Expat Expo | Immigrant Invasion Festival!
A staged reading of a new science play by Deborah Zoe Laufer about identity, representation and the answer to the question of who owns the rights to genetic knowledge.
Jillian, a young geneticist, is thrilled to be able to work with a tribe of Native Americans living in the Grand Canyon. She does tests for the susceptibility to diabetes which is threatening to wipe out the tribe. Her tests reveal no such genetic connection but she does find out other things: for example, that the tribe had originally migrated from Siberia. The tribal council, however, had not given its consent for those additional tests to be conducted: Siberia? The tribe’s origin myth clearly roots them in the Grand Canyon. The council threatens to sue the university if the results are published …
At home, Jillian has to confront her own genetic disposition: She knows that she inherited a gene variant clearly related to Alzheimer’s. Should she do tests on her daughter to find out if she has it, too? Her husband clearly says NO!
Deborah Zoe Laufer: “One of the questions the play asks is, ‘Now that we can know the story of our past and perhaps the story of our future through our genome, well, who are we?’ Are we our stories? Are we our genome? Are we our memories, our tribe, our race? What defines us?” – “A friend sent me the New York Times article about the court case between the Havasupai Native Americans, who live on the floor of the Grand Canyon, and Arizona State University. I learned subsequently that it was a landmark case concerning informed consent, and has changed the laws about what needs to be specified in consent forms for scientific research on human subjects. But what fascinated me at first was the clash of cultures, and the intersection of science and religion. And learning more about the genome, I realized questions of identity are much more complicated than we once thought.“
Deborah Zoe Laufer grew up in Liberty, New York. She attended State University of New York at Purchase and Juilliard School in New York City, where she graduated from the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program in 2000, and was also the playwright-in-residence. Her works have been produced at Ensemble Studio Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Actor’s Theatre of Louisville, Portland Stage and eighty other theaters around the country, in Germany, Russia and Canada. Her plays include The Last Schwartz, Fortune, End Days, Out of Streno, Sirens, Leveling Up, Meta, The Three Sisters of Weehawken, The Gulf of Westchester, Miniatures, and Random Acts.The reading is part of ETB | IPAC’s SCIENCE & THEATRE series.
