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International Performing Arts Center
Blog Archive
The Panel
The Panel is a talk show in the form of a staged reading in which five unique personalities engage in a heated, polarizing and humorous discussion about political conditions of the world.
These five guests turn a common and civilized conversation into the most unsuccessful debate in history.
A Flor Da Pele
In Brazil, people say they are à flor da pele (at the flower of the skin or inflorescent skin) when they find their emotions overcoming their reason, just like sweat involuntarily blossoms through the pores of the skin.
It is a moment of excitement, fear, anxiety and physical effort, a moment guided by our non-rational knowledge and deepest desires, our anger and our erotica.
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Second Class Queer
Actor and writer Kumar Muniandy questions his identity, queerness, internalized homophobia and experiences of racism with his play. In the midst of these terms and their politics, Kumar seeks his own truth.
Is it possible to live as a brown gay man in Germany and find healing while carrying the weight of oppression from his motherland? Set in a speed-dating event, will Kumar’s leading man, Krishna, win the role he wants in this audition for love?
Through the lens of his experience as a Tamil-Malaysian queer person living in Berlin, Kumar Muniandy is developing a theater piece that investigates the connections between internalized homophobia that stems from anti-homosexuality laws of the colonial era and the structural racism he experiences.
What are the consequences of such merciless neocolonialism for the mental health of queer minorities living in Germany today? After all, Krishna, like Kumar, is on a pursuit of forgiveness and self acceptance.
Second Class Queer is dedicated to Nhaveen.
The Shit Show
Anali Goldberg is the most notable thing to come out of the pastoral village of Anal Heights since the discovery of their local delicacy, the dingleberry.
Now Anali is in Berlin and wants to celebrate spring but can’t because the world stinks. She doesn’t have any money, there are shitty images on the streets and shitty songs in her head. The shit is hitting the fan on a daily basis. In between one shit storm and the next, Anali wants to get some fresh mountain air and is planning her trip to Dreckloch in the Alps. But before she can do that, she has to get her shit together and earn some cash to pay off her debts in the neighborhood like the good old days before individual toilet stalls were invented.
You can look forward to an evening full of real old shit watching some really shitty performers give their all and do what they like doing most…while wearing some shitty costumes with some shitty lighting and a shitty host.
S.O.A.R. Study of a Rice Queen
THE LAB: the very first public presentation of work-in-progress by Ming Poon, in collaboration with the Berliner Förderprogramm Künstlerische Forschung (2022-2023).
“This is part of my ongoing artistic research on developing performance strategies to decolonize my body and its representation as an Asian person within the European hegemony. In S.O.A.R. Queen, I turn my research focus on my queer Asian body. Western queer culture and theory are overwhelmingly used as the point of reference in mainstream discourse and understanding of queerness, whitewashing the queer expressions of other cultures. I see this as a form of cultural colonization. As an expansionist project, colonialism is as much about occupying foreign territories, as it is about appropriating culturally-othered bodies and erasing their cultural contexts, histories and knowledge.
In this research, my aim is to develop performance strategies to decolonize queerness through the use of drag as a tool to challenge and de-center the hegemonic west-centric notion of queerness, as well as, disrupt the heteropatriarchal norms in Chinese culture. The task is to construct conceptual prototypes for a decolonial and anti-patriarchal drag, which takes its central reference from the male-to-female impersonation in Chinese opera called Nan Dan (男旦).
S.O.A.R. Queen is supported by the Berliner Förderprogramm Künstlerische Forschung (2022-23). Over a period of 2 years, I work with the 3 archetypal female roles that are most celebrated in Chinese opera: 1) the warrior, 2) the lover and 3) the concubine. This first phase of the research is dedicated to the female warrior: Mulan (花木兰).”
– Ming Poon
Followed by a post-performance discussion
The Berlin Diaries
The great-grandfather of Oregon Book Award-winning playwright Andrea Stolowitz kept a journal for his descendants after escaping to New York City in 1939 as a German Jew.
Following the complicated lure of genealogy, Stolowitz goes back to Berlin to bring the story of her unknown ancestors out of the archives into the light. The record keeps as many secrets as it shares; how do people become verschollen, lost, like library books?
A limited number of free tickets have been reserved for student groups and their teachers. Please register as soon as possible by email at tickets@etberlin.de
Complete funding for this production has been generously provided by the U.S. Embassy in Berlin.
Andrea Stolowitz is a German/American playwright currently living and working in Cork, Ireland. Her work embraces bold theatricality ranging from intimate portrayals of the human condition to the intersection of national history on private lives. Andrea is a member of New Dramatists class of 2026, an alumna of The Playwrights’ Center, and a collaborating writer with the internationally lauded devised theater company Hand2Mouth Theatre. Andrea is the Lacroute Playwright-in-Residence at Artists Repertory Theater. Andrea has taught at Duke University, NYU, UC-San Diego, Willamette University and NUI-Galway.
Back Home
THE LAB: Artist and Audience Development
Rule of Three Collective are together again. For the first time since March 2020.
In the meantime, we’ve spent hours and hours at home; working for money, working out, working out our social lives, working without being paid for it, working on better sleep. How has this time changed our ideas of home? What do we need in order to feel at home? What else can be a home apart from the physical space we live in? And what happens when three performers finally come back to a space they haven’t been to in a while – a theater?
During the residency at ETB | IPAC, Rule of Three Collective will re-embark on an open journey towards notions of home and share some of the findings at the end of the week. Join us back home!
Followed by a post-performance discussion
Exotic Animal (Live)
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” – Audre Lorde
Exotic is warm and spicy. It is one letter away from erotic. It promises adventure. Exotic is somewhere far away and foreign. Exotic is strange, but also very appealing and desirable. It is always over there, not here; them, not us; you, never me. Exotic is dark and mysterious, but its threat is tamed and contained.
The exotic industry has become a big and lucrative market, offering goods and services ranging from food, fashion, music, books, health products, workshops, collectibles, antiques to cultural attractions, theme events, tourism and corporate branding. It has often been touted as a fun and light way to promote the appreciation and experience of foreign cultures. But is it as innocent as it appears? What lurks beneath its foreigner-friendly surface? This collaborative performance invites the audience to see what it takes to create the ideal exotic look.
Drawing on his personal experience as a dancer of Asian origin, Ming Poon looks at how eurocentrism, globalization and cultural consumerism contribute to the exoticization of his body for the art market. Approaching the body as a site on which meanings, values and boundaries are inscribed, he interrogates how the exotic gaze displaces and appropriates his body, turning it into a cultural commodity and a symbol of subjugation. Exotic Animal both invites and confronts the exotic gaze. Staring defiantly back, it attempts to shift the power relation between the gazer and itself.
Warning: This performance contains cultural stereotypes and the white/racialized gaze.
Ming Poon is a Berlin-based choreographer who began his career as professional dancer in 1993 and started to develop his choreographic practice in 2010. He creates choreographic interventions, where spectators are invited to exercise their agency to create change. His works are interactive and collaborative in design. They usually take the form of collaborative performances, public interventions and one-to-one encounters. He works with vulnerability, care, peripherality and failure as performance strategy.
His practice is influenced by Buddhist concept of interdependence and care, Judith Butler’s resistance in vulnerability, Augusto Boal’s theater of the oppressed and Nicolas Bourriaud’s micro-utopias.
His works have been presented at Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay (Singapore), The Substation (Singapore), English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center (Berlin, Germany), Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin, Germany), Scenario Pubblico | Centro Nazionale di Produzione della Danza (Catania, Italy) and Südpol (Luzern, Switzerland).
This Gentle Moment
Hi Absalon,
in the cell,
in Tokyo or Paris?
you scream (at me)
I scream (at you)
we stay apart
we, meaning you
meaning gone
too
fast
With This Gentle Moment, I am creating a duet film for two performers built on the materialization and physicalization of encounters around queer lived experiences. In directing my attention to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, I want to set off on a choreographic reflection on living in and with a pandemic at a time when our society as a whole has been gripped by one anew.
This Gentle Moment is the first of a series of three works that are inspired by visual artists who passed away from HIV/AIDS. As a choreographer, I am negotiating the essence of their artwork from the perspective of contemporary dance. This Gentle Moment is a homage to Meir Eshel Absalon’s work Proposal for a Habitat. We built and inhabited spaces in which we ask for the relationship between queer (social) bodies and places to experiment with isolation and its resonance. (Nitsan Margaliot)
This Gentle Moment is supported by the NATIONAL PERFORMANCE NETWORK – STEPPING OUT, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the framework of the initiative NEUSTART KULTUR. Assistance Program for Dance.
