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Info Abend for the 2014 Expat Expo: A Showcase of Wahlberliner
English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center puts its Miete where its mouth is with our annual festival featuring our most important resource – the community of international artists and the English-language Freie Szene.
The Expo has three components: evening performances, daytime workshops and family-friendly programming as well as the Expat Markt, a weekend-long marketplace cum performance installation featuring the goods and services of international visual artists, business owners and performers. Each evening features a curated selection of performances by multiple artists (in every genre imaginable) taking place throughout our entire facility, from our stage to our dressing rooms to our breathtaking courtyard.
Do you want to be part of the 2014 Expat Expo? Come to the Info Abend on April 16 at 7pm to find out how to apply!
Expat Expo: June 9 – 13, 2014
Expat Markt: June 14 + 15, 2014
Bring-A-Thing
What the hell is Bring-A-Thing???
Oskar Brown’s 100% improvised storytelling madness. YOU, the audience, bring a “THING”. It can be any “THING”, from the mundane to the unmentionable.
You place the “THING” in the cardboard box on stage, take your seat and let Oskar Brown transport you into his wacky world. Everyone should bring a “THING” and be ready for everything, because anything can happen. Don’t worry! Every “THING” will be returned after the show. Unbroken, undamaged, unconsumed and unsexed…
“He is gifted in his ability to craft imagery with words and a pretty charming and engaging way of going about it. It is an hour show that feels like 10 minutes, leaving everyone wanting more.” (Broadway World Magazine)
ISAAC’S EYE
by Lucas Hnath
Sex, drugs & science in the 17th century
Watch the video trailer HERE !!
Isaac Newton wants to become a member of the Royal Society. Catherine wants to start a family.
Robert Hooke wants to know what Newton knows. The guy with the plague wants to stay alive. They conduct a risky experiment.
Afterwards, Newton doesn’t know any more than before but Hooke gets his sex diary back, Catherine’s skepticism is stronger than ever and the guy with the plague is dead.
Science moves in mysterious ways.
Isaac’s Eye mixes the facts of Isaac Newton’s life with an equal dose of fiction to explore what great people are willing to sacrifice to become great people.
It puts the history of science onstage, juxtaposing historical characters and facts with our 21st century based projection of them.
And by the way – it’s the best science comedy out there!
“I tend to write plays about people who are trying to do something that is impossible or nearly impossible. I’m interested in people who are trying to accomplish things that very few people will ever accomplish. … Huge ambition brings with it aspects of wonder, high stakes, and danger. But even more interesting than that, when you combine enormous ambitions with the small conflicts we experience everyday, the ordinary becomes illuminated. There’s a Virginia Woolf quote that I like very much: The paraphernalia of reality have at certain moments to become the veil through which we see infinity. We are neither roused nor puzzled; we do not have to ask ourselves, What does this mean? We feel simply that the thing we are looking at is lit up, and its depths revealed. Conflating the mythic with the miniscule has become my strategy for piercing Woolf’s veil.” Lucas Hnath
Lucas Hnath is one of the most promising voices in contemporary US theater. His other plays include Death Tax (Humana Fest/Steinberg Award), NightNight, A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney (Soho Rep) and Red Speedo (Studio Theatre, Washington DC). A resident playwright at New Dramatists since 2011, Lucas Hnath has enjoyed playwriting residencies with The Royal Court Theatre, London and 24Seven Lab, New York. He is a two-time winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant for his feature-length screenplays, The Painting, the Machine and the Apple and Still Life. He received both his BFA and MFA from NYU’s Department of Dramatic Writing and is a lecturer in NYU’s Expository Writing Program.
Isaac’s Eye is part five of Science&Theatre, a collaboration of English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center with Prof. Dr. Regine Hengge (Institute for Biology/Microbiology at the Humboldt University Berlin) and her team of young scientists.
Photo Lucas Hnath: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times | Production photo: Magnus Hengge/adhoc
Supported by the Andrea von Braun Stiftung
I Gave Him An Orchid
I gave him an orchid. I said I’m sorry I was weird with you but I had a difficult childhood.
I Gave Him An Orchid is an exploration of heart break now and then: In 1885 Sarah Henley throws herself off Bristol Suspension Bridge. She lives. In 2014 Sarah talks about it and other things that push us over the edge. It is not about suicide, well it is a bit, but it’s mainly about love and what it makes us do.
Sarah Calver is a British performer, writer and director of theater, now based in Berlin. She trained at Lecoq and The Central School of Speech and Drama. She has experience and interest in devised and collaborative theater, physical theatre, puppetry and new writing. She has created and performed with companies including Fevered Sleep, Offstage, The National Theatre, Blind Summit, Tangled Feet, Made in China, FanShen, GameShow, Moving Dust, Gecko, The Wooster Group, Fabulous Beast and Old Vic New Voices. Her writing includes Twelve Miles From Nowhere (nominated for 2012 Writers Guild Award), Piswer (Pulse Festival 2013) and I Gave Him An Orchid.
Flight of the Escales is an international theater collective. Founded by Sarah Calver (UK) and Marie Filippi (France) to act as a platform to get together, exchange ideas, practices and skills and create new work for ourselves and for an international audience. We are interested in good non-cluttered story-telling; in the theatrical and visceral, the epic and the simplistic; in trusting the performer and the audience; in the collaboration and in the play.
Schwarz gemacht
What is “identity”? What makes us who we are? Who has the right to define us?
Set in 1938 Berlin and drawing heavily upon history, the play imagines a story that examines universal questions of self and citizenship primarily through the eyes of a patriotic Afrodeutscher (Afro-German) actor. Proud to serve his country, he appears in propaganda films calling for the return of Germany’s former African colonies. An encounter with an African-American musician and activist leads to hard questions about the treatment of people of color both in Germany and in the United States of America.
Schwarz gemacht is the first project to move completely through English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center’s new work development series, THE LAB, to receive a full production. It was part of the Colorblind? series of staged readings examining racial identity on stage in 2012 and a two-week workshop was held in December 2013.
The production of Schwarz gemacht featured an exhibition in our foyer exploring the historical themes of the play.
Post-performance discussions will be offered on Thursday, February 27 (moderated by Katharina Oguntoye), Thursday, March 6 and Friday, March 14 (moderated by Dr. Tina Campt, Barnard College)
Supported by the US Embassy, Berlin and the Checkpoint Charlie Foundation
TERRAIN OF THRESHOLD VOICES
The exhibition and performance project Terrain of Threshold Voices is dedicated to forms of artistic research on language in relation to the transformation of the urban landscape though migratory movements. Inspired by the presence of written expressions (such as advertisements, posters, graffiti, t-shirts, etc) – which take the contemporary city as a textual surface – language phenomena are explored as terrains of friction between different communities.
It connects the ongoing investigation on dissident practices of precarious bodies within the framework of District’s dissident desire with the histories and present narratives of migration in Berlin that are examined by Aliens of Extraordinary Abilities? at English Theatre Berlin. Engaging with the interstices of different languages and cultures of space, Terrain of Threshold Voices manifests in an exhibition as a performative zone of conflict. Moving beyond normative attribution and cultural representation, the exhibition opens a language laboratory of threshold jargons that emerge from transitional states.
The project combines this experimental approach with performative movements throughout the district of Tempelhof-Schöneberg surrounding District Kunst- und Kulturförderung. The site-specific performances by Hanne Lippard and Wilhelm Klotzek take this microcosm as their field of exploration and action. Both the exhibition and the performances in the neighborhoods map out terrains, structures and movements which emerge at intersections and ruptures between different social narratives of Berlin.
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
November 13 – December 7, 2013
Exhibition opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday 2 – 6pm
November 12, 2013
6 – 10pm Opening
7pm La langue Schaerbeekoise lecture and discussion by Constant / Peter Westenberg
9pm concert performance by Jaume Ferrete
November 23, 2013
3pm PHONE-IN, CALL OUT. A disembodied tour by Hanne Lippard
6pm Terrain of Threshold Voices – READER Presentation by Pieterjan Grandry & Valentina Karga
8pm Broken Dimanche Press presents Dime Bumshow readings
9pm In-between-ness: creating, writing and living in-between languages, genres and forms lecture and discussion by Camille De Toledo
November 30, 2013
3pm Stätte – Stimme am Subjekt Performance tour through the Kiez by Wilhelm Klotzek
6pm City says lecture and talk by Nasan Tur
7:30pm Touristen fisten ist auch keine Lösung lecture and discussion by Peter Laudenbach
December 7, 2013
3pm Stätte – Stimme am Subjekt Performance tour through the Kiez by Wilhelm Klotzek
4:30pm PHONE-IN, CALL OUT. A disembodied tour by Hanne Lippard
6pm Closing – Performance program in conjunction with dissident desire Chapter 1: Exercises of Critical Bodybuilding with Alicia Frankovich, Emma Haugh, Dafna Maimon, Miryana Todorova
Exhibition
For Terrain of Threshold Voices, Anna Bromley will update her artistic work investigating forms of political expression within the scope of recent protest movement with an eye towards Berlin. In her installation, a karaoke version of protest speeches, the visitors can lend their voices to various political speeches. On November 10, her radio feature A City After Our Heart‘s Desire presented the urban resistance and “their” Berlin. The exhibition also includes Larissa Fassler with new work exploring Berlin’s Schlossplatz (2013), Jaume Ferrete with the video documentation of a choral performance as well as work by Constant and Nasan Tur.
Performance Tours Through the Kiez
Hanne Lippard PHONE-IN, CALL OUT
The phone-persona is delightfully visually shrouded, only surrounding sounds can give your lies away. There are no waterfalls in the city. Prior to our cellphone lives, a phone call had a given time and space, it was an agreement between two distant parts. In a culture depending on a phone to serve as a multi-tasking nomadic gizmo, Hanne Lippard’s call-shop tour is an exploration into the specificity of the phone-call as a fixed act in time as well as location.
November 23, 3pm – Meeting point: District Kunst- und Kulturförderung. Please sign up for the tour by November 21 by sending an email to post@district-berlin.de
December 7, 4:30pm – Meeting point: District Kunst- und Kulturförderung. Please sign up for the tour by December 5 by sending an email to post@district-berlin.de
Wilhelm Klotzek Stätte – Stimme am Subjekt
In his performance Stätte – Stimme am Subjekt, Wilhelm Klotzek connects the location of the Gaststätte (restaurant or public house) with garden colony politics and hardware store cosmoses through bold language sculptures. In the middle of the garden colonies surrouding the Priesterweg S-Bahn station , set off on a daring tour of ideas through territories of growth, construction and do-it-yourselfing. For a short time, you will be part of a movement you didn’t even know existed until now: weclome to the “multitool” club.
November 30, 3pm – Meeting point: SÜDEN Gartenlokal inside the Priesterweg S-Bahn station. Please sign up for the tour by November 28 by sending an email to post@district-berlin.de
December 7, 3pm – Meeting point: Restaurant ZUR ZIEGENWEIDE, opposite the Priesterweg S-Bahn station. Please sign up for the tour by December 5 by sending an email to post@district-berlin.de
Lectures and Discussions
Constant / Peter Westenberg, Nasan Tur, Valentina Karga & Pieterjan Grandry, Camille de Toledo, Peter Laudenbach and Broken Dimanche Press
Constant / Peter Westenberg La langue Schaerbeekoise
The exhibition will be opened by the Belgian collective Constant and a presentation of their long-term project La langue Schaerbeekoise (2010-2013) exploring the further development and renewal of language through various cultural influences.
November 12, 7pm
Pieterjan Grandry & Valentina Karga Terrain of Threshold Voices – READER
Building upon the basis of Valentina Karga’s socio-artistic engagement in the gardens near District and primarily upon its failure, she and Pieterjan Grandry will publish a Reader that includes a selection of text, quotes and references on the topic of the project as well as the individual contributions to the exhibition and can be purchased.
November 23, 6pm
Broken Dimanche Press Dime Bumshow
The editor in chief of the independent publisher BROKEN DIMANCHE PRESS, John Holten, invites artists, writers and performers to participate in Dime Bumshow. Slang, dialects and local expression will be investigated as literary phenomena within the framework of readings.
November 23, 8pm
Camille de Toledo In-between-ness: creating, writing and living in-between languages
Toledo Art Forms is the art platform through which Camille de Toledo writes and creates. From photography to fiction writing to theory to art installation, his work is endlessly designing a space in-between genres, identities and languages. In this performed conference, he will give us a hint of why Zwischenheit is the other name for his 21st century art and politics.
November 23, 9pm
Nasan Tur City says
Berlin-based artist Nasan Tur presents his exploration of international urban spaces for all kinds of graffiti and street poetry in his City says series. He develops various translations such as performances, videos or posters from the text material that connect current political realities with local everyday sayings and subculture expressions. At District, he will present his work Istanbul Says in a lecture and discussion.
November 30, 6pm
Peter Laudenbach Touristen fisten ist auch keine Lösung
Touristen fisten ist auch keine Lösung. Out of principle: I don’t want to have sex with people who consume the city I live in like it’s a picture on a postcard. The tourist is the perfect consumer. The city transforms itself into an amusement park for them. Inhabitants of the city are pieces of decoration or service personnel. In touristy Berlin, Guy Debord’s famous “society of spectacle” has long since become reality.
Peter Laudenbach is a theater critic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung and a theater editor for the city magazine tip. Most of all, however, he enjoys his work for the business magazine brand eins. He has written a good-humored aggressive book about tourism in Berlin: Die elfte Plage, published by Edition Tiamat.
November 30, 7:30pm
A collaboration between District Kunst- und Kulturförderung and English Theatre Berlin – International Performing Arts Center
Salomania
MARK JACKSON is English Theatre Berlin´s Fall 2013 Playwright In Residence.
He will direct a staged reading of his play Salomania.
In 1895, Maud Durrant moved from San Francisco to Berlin, Germany, to study music. Shortly after, her brother killed two girls in the belfry of a church. Their mother told Maud to stay in Europe and change her name, lest the scandal ruin her career. Now going by Maud Allan, she became a major celebrity in Great Britain as a dancer and society personality. In 1918, in the weariest depths of WWI, she was accused by a British MP, Noel Pemberton-Billing, of being a lesbian, sadist, and German sympathizer as evidenced by her having played the title role in a private production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome.
Against the advice of friends in high places, Maud sued Billing for libel. He then used the case as a platform to promote a conspiracy theory involving a secret German book listing the names of 47,000 traitors to England, all held under the thumb of homosexual German agents. While soldiers continued to fight and die in the mud of France, people back home read the latest on the salacious events of the trial. Salomania uses this story as the basis to ask questions about how people deal with anxiety in times of incredible change. How can a society allow itself to be both hysterical and “civilized” at the same time, and expect to function either well, morally, or respectably?
Mark Jackson is a playwright, director, and performer based in San Francisco, USA. He was Artistic Director of Art Street Theatre from 1995 to 2004, during which time he wrote, directed and performed in numerous productions for the company. Mark’s work in the San Francisco area has also been seen at Aurora Theatre Company, Encore Theatre Company, EXIT Theatre, Marin Theatre Company, Potrzebie Dance Project, San Francisco International Arts Festival, Shotgun Players, and Z Space, among others. Nationally at The Catamounts (Denver) and The Studio Theatre (Washington D.C.). Internationally at Arts International Festival IV (Japan), Edinburgh Festival Fringe (UK), and Deutsches Theater Berlin (Germany). Mark has been a resident playwright of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, where he was awarded the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Honorary Fellowship, and received a 2005 Bundeskanzler-Stipendium of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Mark has been a company member of The Shotgun Players since 2010.
White Rabbit, Red Rabbit
No rehearsals. No director. No set. A different performer reads the script cold for the first time at each performance. Will you participate? Will you be manipulated? Will you listen? Will you really listen?
Forbidden to leave his country for refusing military duty as a conscientious objector, playwright Nassim Soleimanpour distilled the experience of an entire generation in a wild, utterly original play from Iran. He was unable to experience the success celebrated by White Rabbit, Red Rabbit around the world until the beginning of 2013 in Australia. Having been retroactively discharged from service, Soleimanpour finally was able to receive a passport.
White Rabbit, Red Rabbit is a work about contemporary Iran, and of Nassim’s generation: the generation born during the incredible hardship of the Iran-Iraq war now in their late 20s and early 30s. A generation that has never known an Iran other than the Islamic Republic, yet a generation that is computer literate, and well‐informed. The art they are making is worthy of notice.
White Rabbit, Red Rabbit is a unique theater experience and has been celebrated worldwide as one of the most astonishing evenings in a theater where both audience and performer as a whole create a performance about the ties and tensions between freedom and conformity.
“The playwright slyly examines the desire to submit to authority and the ways in which that impulse can be exploited by the clever and the charismatic. Soleimanpour, who was 29 when he wrote the play, translates these dark and disturbing themes into an outrageous parable involving vials of poison, rabbits and cheetahs, oh my. It’s an intoxicating stream of consciousness from the heart of Iran that will leave you at once amused and alarmed.” San Jose Mercury News
“There´s a magnetic mind behind the prose. Rabbit is a lightly comic, deceptively discursive, meta-theatrical monologue that – without, I hope, giving too much away – raises provocative questions about the nature of theater, social responsibility, personal freedoms, suicide and the limits of obedience.” San Francisco Chronicle
White Rabbit, Red Rabbit has been performed in Edinburgh, Toronto, Dublin, Oslo, Glasgow, Oldenburg, San Franscisco, Brighton, Vancouver, New Haven (Connecticut), Amsterdam, Athens, Calgary, London, Montreal, Düsseldorf by performers such as Tim Crouch, Lucy Ellinson, Edgar Selge, David Greig, Sandy Grierson, John von Düffel, Guy Masterson, Imogen Kogge, Adura Onashile, Annie Ryan, Juliet Stevenson, Chris Thorpe, Janet Suzman, Pip Utton, Anna Thalbach, Chris Kondek, Gregor Weber and many others.
NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME IN BERLIN !
ECHTER BERLINER !!!! IHR NICHT FUCK YOU
FUCK YOU TOURISTS. NO MORE ROLLKOFFER. WELCOME TO SCHWABYLON. Berlin 
U. Greetings from the Berlin welcoming committee in the form of meter-high graffiti adorning every available surface. One, ECHTER BERLINER !!!! IHR NICHT FUCK YOU, especially invites questions. What is a “real Berliner”? According to whom?
ECHTER BERLINER !!!! IHR NICHT FUCK YOU is a documentary theater piece exploring the diverging and converging experiences of so-called “expats”, often coming from comparably richer countries who travel to Berlin for self-realization, with those of so-called “immigrants”, often coming from comparably poorer countries for financial survival. At least, these are the generalizations.
For this piece, an international ensemble of six performers, each connected to a so-called “expat” or “immigrant” group, have conducted interviews with more than 60 members of their respective communities about their experiences in Berlin. Every word spoken on stage is taken from direct transcriptions of these interviews, revealing an oft-surprising picture of reality far beyond the banality of stereotypes.
Production photo by Manuela Schauerhammer
