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So Many Ideas

So Many Ideas is a performance that explores a moral crisis we cannot quite name: a silent, self-destructive malaise, an obscure calamity.

Set in a crumbling portside hotel room at the edge of their civilization, three women—one terminally ill—take refuge in their shared space. One plays the violin almost absentmindedly, another sings, while the other murmurs, dreams, pleads and remembers. Together, their words overlap, complete, and challenge one another like a Baroque cadenza—a reflection of culture, a nervous tic, an urgent search for meaning: how they got there; how we all got here.

Drawing inspiration from Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, Wallace Shawn’s The Fever, and musically from Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto, So Many Ideas confronts the present moment: in a world overflowing with brilliance, beauty, and invention—so many choices, so much creativity—why do we keep ending up in the same places, with so little to show for it?

85 minutes, sung and spoken in English, German and Italian, partially subtitled in German and English

Pop! Andy Warhol & The Velvet Underground

Part 3 of our series of “Conversations with a Cultural Icon”

With the band RED LARGO and a cast of five actors, Pop! Andy Warhol & The Velvet Underground, attempts to provide a performative answer to the question of how Pop became Culture in the 1960s and 1970s. Following Jaws and Bowie in Berlin, we play and dance and sing the pain away!

Five curators are planning an art exhibition: Andy Warhol’s Underground Years 1965 – 68. Tricky. What do they want to exhibit, what can they agree on? A Factory reenactment? Cover versions of Velvet Underground songs played live in the museum? Underground films in video format? One thing is sure –  just like the Velvets, there will be much more discord than harmony.

Sixty years ago, pop artist Andy Warhol suddenly shapeshifted into a filmmaker. Flanked by his so-called “Superstars”, he shot flicks like Blow Job, Chelsea Girls and Lonesome Cowboys; crude, daring, offbeat black-and-white movies walking the fine line between pornography and arthouse film. Along with these “underground films”, he presented the ultra-wild and ultra-loud performance series Exploding Plastic Inevitable as well as produced the debut album of the rock band The Velvet Underground with the German singer Nico – the album cover featured the most iconic image of those few “underground years”, the yellow banana.

The art world responded with a collective shrug, but was more than happy to serve as a permanent guest at Warhol’s hustling, bustling factory where the art was made in the front, the shagging was taking place in the back and amphetamines were taken everywhere.

Hardly anyone wanted to see the films, the performance series earned scathing reviews and no one bought the album.

Six decades later, however, they have become cherished cultural icons like the works of Picasso, Wagner or Fellini, while the Factory is now deemed a central historical site for queer emancipation. How did that happen?

Pics: ETB (pic 1) / Stefania Migliorati (pics 2 + 3)

Anne Welenc and Michel Wagenschütz

the lab: artist and audience development

Are we the protagonists of our own lives or merely supporting characters in larger narratives? How do the stories we tell and the roles we embody shape our understanding of agency, power, and collaboration?

During a one-week LAB, Anne Welenc and Michel Wagenschütz will explore these questions both thematically and formally, presenting a double feature of new material. Revisiting their shared history of collaboration, they reimagine their artistic roles by guiding each other on stage and dissolving traditional hierarchies.

Anne centers her investigation of classical dramatic works on the significance of female supporting characters, focusing on the substance of the Minnas, Bertas and Gretchens, while Michel, inspired by his project He’s Got It, explores creation myths and genius narratives in musical theater, addressing professionalization, societal aspirations, and personal vulnerability.

They are accompanied by Anastasia Mandel, who adds another live dimension to the performance, responding to the dynamics on and off stage with sound, music and samples, weaving an auditory layer that interacts with the unfolding narrative.

Anne Welenc, a director and playwright rooted in critical feminist research, combines classical theater with elements of dance, pop and club culture. Her works, including QUEENS and Gargoyles, reimagine gender, power and social narratives, offering contemporary perspectives on historical and literary figures.

Michel Wagenschütz, a visual artist and filmmaker, studied contemporary art and photography at the Berlin University of the Arts and performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His practice navigates the intersections of image-making, space and performative strategies, addressing social realities and their contradictions.

Anastasia Mandel is an artist, biohacker, performer and musician based in Berlin.
She began producing music and together with Sergei Kasich, coined the genre Ambient Punk. Her influences draw from performance art, musique concrète and the fair use sampling and branding strategies employed by bands like Negativland.

 

A Guide To Self-Synthesis

With its new performance, Opera Lab Berlin takes inspiration from pioneers of electronic music such as Wendy Carlos, SOPHIE and Pauline Oliveros in their new performance. They celebrate overcoming mechanical-acoustic sound production and going beyond heteronormative boundaries.

Together with trans singer-songwriter Marlene Bellissimo, known from The Voice of Germany, Opera Lab Berlin explores the sonic potential of electronics for defining your own parameters in A Guide To Self-Synthesis. Its transformative, transgressive power and frequencies of (self-)expression become the focus of the performance, for which composer Evan Gardner creates a pluralistic combination of notated but non-restrictive sound fields. The US-American university professor and and activist Susan Stryker, one of the foremost scholars in the field of (trans)gender studies, will take the stage as a special guest with her own contribution to the production.

What possibilities does synthetic sound production offer? How do queer harmonies and trans oscillators sound? Following the principle of Mauricio Kagel’s instrumental theater, singing and dancing, music from synthesizers, motion-tracking technology, composition and choreography come together in A Guide to Self-Synthesis, a new utopian and emancipatory celebration of electronic music.

“[Opera Lab Berlin is] one of the most experimental and refreshing musical theater groups in the Berlin’s independent performing arts community” (Siegessäule),

MARLENE BELLISSIMO is a trans woman and musician. As a trans singer-songwriter often focusing on trans voices in her work, she is interested in how gender fluidity can be expressed through the voice. On TikTok, she celebrates the diversity of trans voices, performing one-woman-duets that showcase her vocal range. In 2023, she released an EP titled christmas with my dead self, and she is known on YouTube for her documentary Finding a Trans Voice, where she discusses the philosophical and practical journey of finding a new voice through her transition. In September 2024, Marlene Bellissimo appeared on The Voice of Germany, astonishing the judges with her vocal artistry.

The Opera Lab Berlin music theater ensemble is a hybrid collective that links all creative elements together. People from all artistic fields come together in Opera Lab: whether music, acting, composition, directing, instruments, choreography, stage and costume design, lighting, stagecraft or dramaturgy – equality is a core principle at Opera Lab Berlin. Since its founding in 2013, the collective has brought over 30 original productions to the stage, featuring compositions by more than 40 contemporary composers and directed by over 18 different directors. The core ensemble has grown to more than 30 members and they collaborate with over 100 artists and production staff.

Where Ye From?

By Growler

Meet Growler, the 82-year-old drum banging, shamanic vulva from the Liberties in Dublin.

Wise as witches with a tongue like a lash and a heart of gold, she will take you on an alchemical theatrical journey.

Using storytelling, song, spoken word and comedy, her mission is to give voice to the voiceless and to transmute the shite out of the female collective trauma.

The performance on November 9th will inaugurate Growler’s Sofa Sessions and feature visiting musician Damien Dempsey and Berlin-based Wallis Bird in a one-night-only event called Songs From the Holywell!

This promises to be a very special night of storytelling, song and conversation between kindred spirits.

“The beauty of Growler is in its roughness, its erratic meandering, its refusal to be one thing or another. It has a sacred chaos of its own, in which Mulrooney thrives.”
The List

Rhythm in Sediment

The very first performance of new work-in-progress by Anna Lublina, followed by a post-performance discussion.

This research seeks to access ancestral knowledge through synchronization: a process of syncing one’s body rhythms with the rhythms of other people, objects or environments. Emerging from archival research on different forms of shared Jewish-Muslim rhythm—Uzbeki Shashmaqam music, prayer, agricultural practices, etc.— we explore tap dance, extended vocal techniques and live mixing to embody specific rhythms and synchronize with the worlds they emerge from.

How do these rhythms from historical moments of Muslim-Jewish conviviality generate different physicalities, states, tensions or intelligences in our bodies? What can these convivial rhythms teach us in a time marked by separation and violence?

This research has been funded by the Ottilie Roederstein Stipendiem from the Hessian Ministry of Science, Research, Art and Culture, Frankfurt Kulturamt and Giessen Kulturamt.

Anna is a current LABA Berlin Fellow, participating in the 2024 Muslim—Jewish creative study and exchange program called “Mar’a’yeh: A Night’s Journey”. This event is part of a month-long (ending 8.12) exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, details of which can be found here. For other upcoming LABA Berlin events and more information, please visit www.laba.berlin and follow (@lababerlin) on Instagram.

Colonizing The Skies

The very first presentation of new work-in-progress by Noémi Ola Berkowitz, followed by a post-performance discussion.

The sky has long been a place of comfort, spirituality, looking upward, and fantasy. But the colonization that marks the rise of empires and nations on land now threatens our atmosphere. The unique combination of technology and ancient stories in the skies above prompted Noémi (who presented new work-in-progress in our 2017 Expo Festival) to gaze upward for this next theatrical project.

With Dena Abay, Djibril Sall and Pamela Moraga

The Money Piece

The very first work-in-progress performance of a new solo by Alexander thomas, followed by a post-performance discussion.

Cash, Jack, Scratch…Moolah.

No matter what you call it, they say that money makes the world go round and most of us seem to spend far too much time thinking about it.

We are very pleased to welcome back actor and playwright Alexander Thomas (Schwarz gemacht) to share and perform the very first work-in-progress showing of his new solo, The Money Piece.

Salvation (Glitter Doesn’t Care I’m A Boy)

A science fiction drag ritual and 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 remanifestations 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.

This solo music theater piece is a mythological and poetic reading of current pop culture and its academic discourse. The music of ancient
Jewish texts and invocations together with visionary tunes of composer Hildegard von Bingen from the 12th century is newly arranged with pop hits, techno compositions and contemporary feminist texts. All of this makes the opera performance a ritual of transformation.

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Shlomi Moto Wagner is Mazy Mazeltov, is Wendy Williams, is Wisława Szymborska, is Fran Drescher, is Hélène Cixous and her Medusa is David Copperfield and Claudia Schiffer IN ONE BODY! And much, much more.

So, what is reality here and what is fiction? In times where a part of society wants to return to the gender roles of the 1950s, or even the 1940s, it is that much more critical to celebrate a festival of the imagination. Let’s make magic. And what comes out at the end? A concert, a drag queen musical, a monologue slam, a magic show, a bar mitzvah or simply a party with the people? Are the props ready? Powder, lipstick and glitter? All right!

Vortex

Immerse yourself in the mesmerizing world of sound and light at Vortex – the newest rendition of the renowned Piano & Light concert series. Join creators Mirella Brandi and Muep Etmo as they return to Berlin for this exclusive performance on September 13 and 14 at 8 PM!

The MXM Duo transcends traditional stage boundaries with an immersive concert experience. Comprised of Mirella Brandi and Muep Etmo, MXM is already recognized in Berlin’s contemporary art scene for their captivating performances. Their interpretation of contemporary compositions for piano and light creates a sensory masterpiece.

Mirella Brandi is a light art designer and Muep Etmo is a musician, composer and sound engineer. They explore the complex relationship between light and music through immersive, multidisciplinary performances that synthesize concepts from cinema, contemporary music, and visual arts.

Get ready to elevate your senses and be transported by new dimensions through light and music!