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THE LAB: My Head Is An Animal

The performance deals with the critical voice inside your own mind. That annoying one that doesn’t seem to go away no matter how hard you try. Questioning who is the voice inside your head and are you listening? It’s also about my mother but that’s a long story so we can save that for later.

A solo piece using text, movement and audio with gentle audience participation.

Followed by a post-performance discussion

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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.

Expo Info Abend and Artists Mixer

Calling all Berlin-based performing artists! We’re holding two information nights and artists mixers for our annual festival! Come by on Monday, December 19 and Tuesday, January 10 beginning at 7pm to meet potential collaborators, see our space and find out everything you need to know to apply to have your work included in the festival! Over the past four years, numerous Expo productions have been created as a result of artists meeting at the festival’s Info Abend and deciding to make new work together.

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.

THE LAB: Three Red Roses

Three Red Roses is a science fiction, dystopian performance.

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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Despina 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.

THE LAB: Shame

Shitting, farting, STDs, growing old, class shaming, language shaming…we all shame ourselves.

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!

Informed Consent

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.

Deborah’s notable awards include the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award in 2009 and a Lilly Award in 2010. She is also a two-time recipient of the LeCompte du Nouy Award from The Lincoln Center Foundation. In 2008, End Days won the American Theatre Critics Association Steinberg citation.

The reading is part of ETB | IPAC’s SCIENCE & THEATRE series.

The Other/Promised Land

“Maybe it’s just a myth.

You have your own history.

I have my own history.

And now we are just sharing the bathroom.”

Shlomo Lieberman and Ulrich Leinz confront three very different love stories in their performance: the disturbing memories about the grandmother who survived Auschwitz, the painful love letters of the German grandfather from Warsaw in 1943 and their own attempt to survive their relationship as a gay German/Israeli couple in Berlin.

Supported by the Israeli Embassy in Berlin and Theaterhaus Berlin Mitte

ÜBERSETZUNG/TRANSLATION/TRADUÇÃO

A performance somewhere between spoken word theater and a “dysfunctional” musical, Übersetzung is a personal kaleidoscopic view of Europe and the world we live in today. It is performed in English, Portuguese and German, a babel of languages.

The rise of nationalism, the reawakened fear of “the other”, the growing feeling of war observed daily in the news are all terrifying. In this tower of Babel that is Europe, will our differences destroy us once again? Haven’t we learned anything?

A: We are from everywhere; we will always be from nowhere…

B: What should I do now? Is there still a Europe? Am I at war? Are we at war? Is my democracy becoming dangerous? For me? For others?

C: How can I say this? How will I be able to communicate this? How can I translate myself?

D: One day we bought a one-way ticket from Lisbon to Berlin and left everything behind. The purpose? Start over. The world is a far good experience to miss. New country. New city. New people. New language(s) and Europe on the brink.”

*Illustration based on the painting The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

Following a stunning premiere at the 2016 Expat Expo | Immigrant Invasion festival, we are very excited to invite this production back for three additional performances!

Featuring a post-performance discussion on December in conjunction with Theater Scoutings Berlin!

Berlin Diary: (Schlüterstraße 27)

The world premiere of a new play by 2015 playwright in residence and Oregon Book Award winning playwright Andrea Stolowitz

In 1936 Dr. Max Cohnreich escapes Berlin, Germany and arrives in NYC settling there with his immediate family. In 1939 he writes about his experiences in a diary intended for his as yet unborn grandchildren. In 2015 his great-granddaughter Andrea Stolowitz travels to Berlin to use the diary to explore the life he describes and the relatives she never knew. The parallel lives of the characters create a narrative about the search for home and family which operates at the border of reality and memory and the intersection of national history and private lives.

A play about remembering and forgetting.

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Featuring post-performance discussions with the cast and creative team on October 7, October 13 and November 10.

Playwright Andrea Stolowitz will be part of the October post-performance discussions and the event on October 13 is in collaboration with Theater Scoutings Berlin.

Berlin Diary: (Schlüterstraße 27) was supported through a 2014-15 DAAD faculty research fellowship, a year-long residency at English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center and grants from the Oregon Arts Commission, The Regional Arts and Culture Council, The Checkpoint Charlie Foundation and the U.S. Embassy in Berlin. The play was developed at the New Harmony Project (Indiana) and PlayPenn (Pennsylvania). It was presented as a staged reading at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia in 2016.

Andrea Stolowitz’s plays have been presented at The Cherry Lane (NYC), The Old Globe (SD), The Long Wharf (CT), New York Stage and Film (NY), and Portland Center Stage (OR). The LA Times calls her work “heartbreaking” and the Orange County Register characterizes her approach as a “brave refusal to sugarcoat…issues and tough decisions.”

A recipient of Artists Repertory Theater’s $25,000 New Play Commission, Andrea premiered her newest work Ithaka at the theater in 2013. The play had its mid-west premiere in Chicago in 2014 at Infusion Theater.

Andrea’s play Antarktikos was awarded the 2013 Oregon Book Award for Drama and was published in July in Theatre Forum magazine. The play world-premiered at The Pittsburgh Playhouse in March 2013 and was workshopped at The New Harmony Project (IN), Portland Center Stage’s JAW Festival, and at Seattle Repertory Theater.

Knowing Cairo received its world premiere at the Old Globe Theatre, which earned San Diego’s “Billie” Best New Play Award and an LA Times’ Critic’s Pick. It is published by Playscripts Inc. and continues to be produced nationally and internationally. It was presented at Profile Theater (OR) in 2013.

Tales of Doomed Love premiered in Washington, DC at The Studio Theater. As part of the 2008 Fringe Festival, DC Theater Scene called it “one of the finest entries in the Capital Fringe” and the Triangle Independent named its production at StreetSigns Center for Literature and Performance (Chapel Hill, NC) “best new play.”

Andrea is a founding member of the playwrights collective Playwrights West and works as a collaborating writer with the award-winning devised theater company Hand2Mouth Theater.

A Walter E. Dakin Fellow at The Sewanee Writers Conference, Andrea has also been awarded residencies at Ledig House, Soapstone, and Hedgebrook, and Arts Grants from North Carolina, Oregon, and private foundations. She is a 2013 Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship winner.

An MFA playwriting alumna of UC-San Diego, Andrea has served on the faculties at Willamette University, The University of Portland, Duke University and UC-San Diego.

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This world premiere production has received financial support from the U.S. Embassy, Berlin, the Checkpoint Charlie Foundation, the playwright is supported by the Oregon Arts Commission and the Regional Arts & Culture Council and the play was developed at the New Harmony Project and PlayPenn

Telion’s Garden (Dirty Granny Tales)

Dirty Granny Tales is an acoustic ensemble that narrates atmospheric stories. Their shows include puppet theater, dance performance and video animation projection, all of which, accompanied by the music, bring the story to life.

Influenced by the atmospheric fairytales of Tim Burton and Guilermo Del Toro, the melodies of Danny Elfman, the irony of Tiger Lillies, The Residents’ sterile landscape, Japanese Gothic theater and Butoh choreography, Dirty Granny Tales transports us to a magical dark world in their own extraordinary way.

Telion’s Garden, a tale influenced by migration, invades human instincts. Indignation and fear lead to desperate decisions. The pursuit of a perfect, flawless, godly world becomes the goal: a world that no flames can destroy, a world that has no room for hellish fire. Alas, the lack of fire can only create an emotionless world. Perfection is an illusion. Life is an inseparable bond of light and darkness. Respecting this bond is the only key to our survival.

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Dirty Granny Tales are:

Stavros Mitropoulos (Mouldbreath): Vocals, Guitar, Mandolin

Thanos Mitropoulos (Wormeaten Vagus): Bass, Blockflute, Backing Vocals

Dalai Theofilopoulou (Slimeskin): Cello, Backing Vocals

Uli Muehe (Heartbeat Zero): Percussion, Backing Vocals

Ruby Wilson: Dance

Giulia del Balzi: Dance

The Color of Honey

The Color of Honey is a glimpse into the daily life of a woman who finds herself a stranger in a strange land.

The story, based on the writer’s experience, explores themes of isolation, privacy, memory, loss and love. The woman in the play envisions a place far away from everything she knows, only to find her fears are not so easy to shake. Coming to Berlin full of hope and with a thirst for discovery, she now finds herself unable to leave her apartment. When her upstairs neighbor falls to his death, a sense of anxiety renders her even more alone, locked inside, communicating only with a dead man. As an alien in a city foreign to her, a city so full of unshakable history and with a spectral quality, where spirits are everywhere, Berlin seeps through the walls of her apartment and she is confronted by the very questions she wishes to hide from.

In The Color of Honey, we put the city on the stage, the woman on the stage and the woman in the city on the stage. Although the woman has already arrived, she still finds herself preparing for a move of huge proportions. It is up to her to come to terms with her next step. Will she survive? Or, like the neighbor upstairs, will she fall down?

After presenting an initial version in the 2014 Expat Expo | Immigrant Invasion festival, we are very pleased to welcome back The Color of Honey in a new and substantially further developed form.