etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center

Blog Archive

Cascando

Pan Pan’s Cascando by Samuel Beckett

Accompany Samuel Beckett’s curious figures into an uncertain future. Attired in dark cloaks and given headphones, audiences are guided through a rhythmic, immersive, group choreographical experience.

First broadcast in 1963, Cascando begins with the curious character Opener (Daniel Reardon) setting the scene: the month of May, a time of “reawakening”.  The Opener commands two other presences: the winding Voice (Andrew Bennett) caught between arrest (” – stories … if you could finish it …”) and progress (“- nearly … just a few more … a few more”), and Music (designed by Jimmy Eadie), whole and forceful.

Director Gavin Quinn, dramaturg Nicholas Johnson and designer Aedín Cosgrove recognize this as a journey. The audience are sent walking in an outdoor landscape, wearing cloaks and listening to the play on headphones.  The unhurried pace of Bennett’s deep and riveting voice provides a rhythm for our steps, as we listen to Voice’s struggle to tell a story.

The absent figure named Woburn is identified by his “same old coat” and vague memories of a cave or shelter. As the same-dressed audience pass each other in the dark surroundings, it appears that images of the text have been slyly extracted. Has the audience been unknowingly cast as the play’s mystifying wanderer?

Along this journey, the tremendous pulse of Eadie’s music threatens to overwhelm. It rises in a wave of crashing strings, eventually settling to ring, pining, with Voice’s efforts. If you suspected that Woburn’s journey resembled a pilgrimage, Reardon’s sullen Opener somewhat confirms it, suggesting God and a parable: “two outings and a return, to the village, to the inn”.

Pan Pan was founded in 1993 by Co-Artistic Directors Aedín Cosgrove and Gavin Quinn. The company has created 52 new theater and performance pieces and toured worldwide, receiving multiple national and international awards. Pan Pan have toured extensively to prestigious venues and festivals around the world including BAM, Lincoln Center, St Ann’s Warehouse, NCPA China, Edinburgh International Festival Sydney and Melbourne Festivals, the Barbican and HAU Berlin. Since its inception, Pan Pan has constantly examined and challenged the nature of its work and has resisted settling into well-tried formulas. Developing new performance ideas is at the center of the company’s mission. All the works created are original, either through the writing (original plays) or through the totally unique expression of established writings. Pan Pan tries to approach theater as an open form of expression and has developed an individual aesthetic that has grown from making performances in a host of different situations
and conditions.
Photo: Matthew Andrews

 

The Berlin Circle Audio Walk

On November 9, the world will mark the 25th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall and with it the beginning of the end of the so-­called Cold War between the capitalist west and communist east, ensuring the dominance of our current globalized market economy. A quarter of a century later, what does all this mean?

Ten years after the Fall of the Wall, noted US playwright and historian Charles Mee wrote Berlin Circle, a collage­like collection of spectacular events set on November 9, 1989 which takes a decidedly satirical look at the end of East Germany and the western feeding frenzy that descended upon the former state property.

This binaural audio walk with original dialog through the real locations of Berlin Circle is led by the Producing Artistic Director of ETB | IPAC, Daniel Brunet, and will take the audience from the Berliner Ensemble through Checkpoint Charlie to the Pergamon Museum. Actors have been recorded performing dialog from Mee’s text at these locations that the audience will listen to via headphones, visually juxtaposed with the present reality of these sites and the cityscape between them. A binaural soundtrack of the route itself accompanies all of this as a third level of time lapse with recordings made several weeks earlier on the same day of the week and at the same time of day.

The Berlin Circle Audio Walk serves as an introduction to the larger ETB | IPAC project 25 Jahre Mauerfall or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ossis/Wessis.

Charles_L_Mee

Charles Mee has written Big Love and True Love and First Love, bobrauschenbergamerica and Hotel Cassiopeia, Orestes 2.0 and Trojan Women A Love Story, and Summertime and Wintertime among other plays–all of them available on the internet at www.charlesmee.org, and, as a free Iphone app at the Iphone app store. His plays have been performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, American Repertory Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, the Public Theatre, Lincoln Center, the Humana Festival, Steppenwolf, and other places in the United States as well as in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Brussels, Vienna, Istanbul and elsewhere.

He was honored with a full season of his plays at the Signature Theatre. Among other awards, he is the recipient of the gold medal for lifetime achievement in drama from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Obies, of a Laura Pels Award, the Booth Award, and of the Richard B. Fisher Award.

He is also the author of a number of books of history (Meeting at Potsdam, The Marshall Plan, The End of Order) that have been selections of the Book of the Month Club and the History Book Club. He is the former editor-in-chief of Horizon magazine, a magazine of history, art, literature, and the fine arts. And he is a lifetime trustee of the Washington think tank, The Urban Institute.

His work is made possible by the support of Jeanne Donovan Fisher and Richard B. Fisher.