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Berlin International Performing Arts Center

Blog Archive

Heartburn

Two women face the truth of the dissolution of the European egalitarian dream.

Everywhere they look things are not equal; in the taxi at the end of the night, on the bench in the middle of a village, in the congregation, in the boardroom, in the home. They tell stories of abortion, sing about violence and dance about menopause. They remember the lies they were told as children and question the hope that things might be different for future generations.

The performance uses puppetry, comedy, song, text and movement to create a hybrid, humorous and powerful perspective on being a woman in Europe today.

“For it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve” – Timothy 2:1

————-> HEARTBURN show trailer

Performed in English, Polish and Spanish with English surtitles

The Workshop

Your Story: A workshop for everyone who has ever identified as a woman – suitable for +15 – led by British visual artist Jo Johnston and the Heartburn cast.

The workshop will be held on Saturday, January 28 from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm. Attendance is free of charge, but you must register in advance by sending an email to info@cosmino.org

After seeing the performance of Heartburn, we invite you to attend a free follow up creative workshop where you will work with members of the artistic team to create “story collages” of your experiences and feelings.

The new works of art created in the in workshop can then be uploaded to our website www.heartburnwomen.com

I Love EU?

A Performative Examination of the EU

Can the European Union be an inspiration for a peaceful postnational world? Is it the non plus ultra expression of what the continent learned from two world wars? Or is it an incredibly strained construct that falls apart at the first signs of a crisis? How does a Eurocentric view differ from that of the increasing number of people forced to leave their homelands and gather at the borders of Europe and the EU in hopes of survival and a dignified existence?

Four performers explore these questions using 50 interviews conducted with EU citizens and non-EU citizens to create an open and interactive evening of theater.

In English and other languages

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.

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!

Yellow Banana

Let’s take a little vacation right in the middle of Berlin! We’ll leave our cares behind and dive into a new world of the unknown. We are celebrating the two-hundred-and-fifty millionth birthday of the Eurasian Plate with a culinary feast, a very special Janchi. This distinctive atonement ritual between Europe and Asia will be commemorated by none other than the one-of-a-kind, authentic banana (“yellow on the outside, white on the inside”) Olivia Hyunsin Kim!

Jaws / Der weiße Hai

“ConversationS with a Cultural Icon” (I)

Jaws / Der Weisse Hai captures the aura of a turning point in history – the mid 1970s – and transforms the film’s images, its music, its evocative qualities into a long overdue conversation with a cultural icon. By examining the (then) critical content and (dwindling) relevance of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 movie Jaws we’re dancing and performing an entertaining and critical new look at this mega blockbuster (in fact, the first one of the so called “blockbuster era” of Hollywood movies).

In 1975, the white shark had to serve as a powerful metaphor, and the film’s worldwide mega-success led to decades of demonization of an animal species. But while the sensational success of Spielberg’s film conveys an image of the species Great White Shark that has long been untenable, it also opened up a new view of the relationship between man and animal, a view of the impending ecological catastrophe.

“It gets all psychological: You yell ‘barracuda!’ Everyone’s just ‘Ha?’. You yell ‘shark!!’ We got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July”

Spielberg’s Jaws is a striking example of a cultural turning point: Just when the so-called counterculture seemed to finally dominate, preparations for a new era began. The names Thatcher, Reagan and Kohl and the economic terms neoliberalism, deregulation and privatization brought traditional values back to the fore and countered the ideas of counterculture. After ten years of youthful optimism, but also mistrust, defeat and fear – Nixon and Watergate; defeat in the Vietnam War, the oil crisis and economic decline – Jaws showed a society banding together in the face of a grave threat, recalling its old values and again producing heroes from its midst.

“We’re gonna need a bigger boat!!”

At the same time, the first voices were raised warning of an ecological catastrophe, of global warming and a major threat to the entire planet. In 1972, the Club of Rome´s famous report, The Limits of Growth, painted an early picture of the disastrous future of planet Earth. Today, overfishing of the oceans and species extinction also threaten the shark populations of our planet – and The Great White is no longer suitable as an animal metaphor for human greed and violence.

Jaws is a movie about a fish, a threat and a hunt. The fish is a giant Great White Shark that appears off a town on the East Coast of the United States. It kills several swimmers and becomes a threat to the summer season of the seaside town, which depends entirely on tourism. An adventurer, a policeman and a scientist pursue the fish in a boat and, after a losing battle, bring it down – the boat sinks, leaving the adventurer and the fish to die.

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Islands

“Paradise is an island. So is hell.”

 (Judith Schalansky, The Atlas of Remote Islands)

Sail away, sail away, sail away…is there anyone who hasn’t been dreaming of that for the last year and a half? Landing on a tropical island far from everyday cares, the news and possibly the pandemic? Inspired by several islands far away and close by, known and unknown, real and metaphorical, a crew of international artists invite the audience to join them on a journey to islands all over the world, from the middle of the deep blue sea to the four walls of our own homes.

Islands have always and continued to serve as the focus of deeply contradictory imaginations fueling both utopian fantasies as well as colonial and imperial greed. The multimedia performance Islands invites audiences to walk the fine line between them.

In Islands, a diverse ensemble of artists come together to share their biographies, marked by migration and exploration and thus full of island stories, with each other as well as the audience.

After the successful coproduction of Stuck in Orbit (2019), Islands is the second cooperation of Post Theater with English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center. Post Theater is a media-theater company that fuses research with the biographic background of their changing casts. Post Theater has worked in more than 20 countries around the world, also including a number of island nations.

Following the world premiere of Islands in July of 2021, we are very pleased to be able to offer an additional six performances!

 

Coffee With Sugar?

Coffee with Sugar? is a production between material performance, biographical and documentary theater.

The two materials coffee and sugar determine the stage in their most different states. Beginning from them, German immigration stories in Central America and their colonial continuities are negotiated. The performer Laia RiCa grew up in El Salvador and Germany. She brings this biographical experience to the piece: the struggle between two worlds, the constant suspicion of betraying her “roots” and the questioning of feelings of inferiority and superiority. From coffee beans and cotton candy, biographical material and historical sources, video fragments and live music, a visually powerful and dense production emerges.

Hidden Path

In the days of old, the Sámi people would say that we had to follow hidden paths to avoid those who want to harm us.

There is a parallel to how the Sámi identity went on a hidden path during the hard Norwegian assimilation process. Now, generations of Sámi live with shame and deny their heritage, the painful story of many indigenous people in this world.

In the interdisciplinary production Hidden Path, the cliché of indigenous heritage is questioned along with the problem of not being “Sámi enough”. How can this be fixed? How do we “unshame”? Using a combination of Sámi joik music, poetry, contemporary dance, contemporary circus, music and projections, this production tells a story about assimilation, shame, identity and belonging.

 

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Transatlantica

Through an autobiographical reappraisal of choreographer Caroline Alves’ family history, the solo performance Transatlantica delves into the voids between Brazil and Europe, between past and present.

It is one among many family histories that are marked by settler colonialism in Brazil: histories based on the erasure of indigenous ancestors, carrying colonial continuities into the present. Following the traces of Senhorinha, the indigenous great-great-grandmother of whom only the colonial name remains, Caroline Alves explores the violent nexus of patriarchy and colonialism.

Transatlantica interweaves dance and storytelling, atmospherically oscillating between the elements of the stage set: the crystalline cold of a block of ice and the spreading, reflecting water that connects the continents. With tenderness and rage, Caroline Alves confronts her ancestral history and present, searching in the voids of the “official narrative” for the place from which to speak with her own words and movements that may break with the vast silence.