etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center

Blog Archive

Ay Kash

Eleven girls use their pens, paints and voices to share their memories and experiences since the Taliban took power in 2021 and offer their hopes and dreams for a better future.

Eleven girls
With our hearts full of hope and desire.
With tears in our eyes and trembling legs, with no way to escape.
We are sitting in our bedrooms in Afghanistan and slowly dying.
Every time we rise to show ourselves, our legs are showered with bullets.
Eleven girls who only ask to be allowed to study, to travel, to let our hair fly in the wind and, from all the riches in this world, own a bicycle. Is it too much to ask? Is it too much if I want to become a psychologist? Or a painter?
Too much if I want to fall in love and have my heart broken? Too much if I prefer freedom over longing?
What it my hair turns grey, and my lips are never kissed?
We never wanted our share of the sky to simply be able to gaze at the moon from our bedroom windows.
I want to swim in the sky. Do I want too much?
Eleven brave warriors, standing against the Taliban’s oppression with our pens, art, poetry, and music.
Ay Kash is the voice of a nation sleeping in blood, the voice of a wounded geography.
Don’t let our desire to swim in the sky, rot in our hearts.
Don’t let the desire to take hold of our pen and fight, disappear.
#StandwithAfghanwomen #ThePeninsteadoftheGun
Text: S
Photo: Rhea Schmitt / Design: F

Since the withdrawal of the US in August 2021, the situation for women in Afghanistan has spiralled into despair. Women do not even have rights to be violated. They have lost the ability to learn, graduate, fall in love, travel alone, go for a walk in the park, or ride a bicycle. Ay Kash / ای کاش / If Only is a hybrid performance featuring live on-stage action and filmed “interaction” with eleven young women in Kabul & Herat, Afghanistan. Their true identities will remain hidden because it is simply too dangerous to do otherwise, but what they want to tell you will be given life and poetic space. And they want to tell you many things: they want to tell you the history of their country from their perspective, their personal stories since the Taliban have taken power, the stories of their mothers, their grandmothers and their hopes and dreams for the future. All this and more will burst into life with the help of song, object theater, storytelling and AI. The performance also features animations designed to protect the identities of the eleven young women by Berlin artist Anna Benner. In addition to the live performance, there is a touring exhibition featuring artwork, texts and soundscapes by the young women.

Under the Starry Afghan Sky are eleven young women aged between 15 – 23 living in Kabul & Heart, Afghanistan under Taliban rule. The collective evolved out of the work of Herat Online School founded by the educational activist Angela Ghayour who herself fled Afghanistan in 1992 and is facilitated by Rachel Karafistan of Cosmino Productions.

The Ay Kash / ای کاش / If Only exhibition featuring artwork, soundscapes and audio recorded by the young women from the Under the Starry Sky collective will take place at Graumaleri, Reuterstraße 82, 12053 Berlin from September 7 – 20. (Vernissage: September 7 at 7pm).

The project is entirely funded by public donations. You can donate to our project HERE.


 

Bowie in Berlin

A Conversation with a Cultural Icon II

In the summer of 1976, pop star David Bowie moves from Los Angeles to Berlin. Why Berlin? Was he attracted by the mixture of Weimar nostalgia, isolated Wall city and niche location for the new music that would later be called Krautrock? In fact, he created radically new music in Berlin in the following two years, recorded both an anthem and a legendary album with `Heroes´, made a curious Weimar-era film with Just a Gigolo, and then disappeared into the pop-synthetic eighties.

“The musical concept of Grosser’s evening works brilliantly …. Just as Bowie’s musical, cinematic and fashionable work has lived from permanent transition and diversity of influence – ready to jump between Krautrock and Expressionism – so is this performance associative and fluid.”     Patrick Wildermann / Tagesspiegel

Great review in Tagesspiegel, read it HERE

In 1987, Bowie returned to Berlin to give a concert in front of the Reichstag, a stone´s throw away from the Wall. East Berliners who came to the Brandenburger Tor to listen started shouting “Bring down the Wall” – the first domino in a series of many that led to the fall of the Wall?

With a performative mixture of music, dance and text, Bowie in Berlin – as the second part of the series `Conversations with a Cultural Icon´ after Jaws / Der weiße Hai –  explores the area where pop touches our lives: as music, as film, as art, as an attitude to life.

Today, the three albums of the so-called `Berlin Trilogy´ are considered the artistic highlight of David Bowie´s career.With his creative curiosity, he went through very different artistic phases in the course of his long career, thus appealing to a new audience each time, and ultimately even to a new generation.

Nowadays, David Bowie is no longer just a pop star, but an important artist, to whom renowned museums dedicated a major exhibition ten years ago. Berlin officials even had a plaque placed on his home in Schöneberg.

Somehow, Bowie touches everyone. How? What does he have to say? What makes him a pop star, what makes him an artist? And why Berlin?

We Can Do It Moaning (ABA NAIA)

What should we use our mouths for? Just for eating? Shouldn’t we also use them for kissing, licking, sucking and moaning?

Let’s send in these post-porn clowns and see how far you can go as a woman*! But watch out: It gets dirty. It gets messy. It gets hilarious and physical. It remains embarrassing and complicated. ABA NAIA teach us about moaning and transform sounds into language. They challenge the patriarchy with their vocal chords. You are invited to take part in a dialogue at the crossroads of science and lies, comedy and porn, feminism and lust.

 

 

Vimeo

By loading the video, you agree to Vimeo’s privacy policy.
Learn more

Load video

 

Learning Feminism From Rwanda

Women in Europe are still fighting for what Rwanda achieved long ago: 62% of their members of parliament are female. In Germany, the figure is just 34%. This East African country declared gender parity the basis of its politics in 1994. Meanwhile in Germany, this kind of parity is still a long way off despite gender equality being enshrined in common law since 1949.

A Rwandan and a German performer discuss numbers and realities from both countries, using a drum as the central symbol of power. They take a peek behind the curtain: if women are empowered, how do men deal with losing their power and what are the lines of confrontation in the home? How slowly or quickly do quotas change a culture and the mindset of a nation?

With speeches, statistics, songs and protest choreography, Learning Feminism from Rwanda follows the trail of Rwandan fast-track feminism from shiny statistics and glass ceilings to hearth and home. Let’s see how much Europe can learn from Rwanda?

Due to the COVID-19 crisis, three performers from Kigali will be present on video and one German and one Rwandan performer will be live on stage.

Vimeo

By loading the video, you agree to Vimeo’s privacy policy.
Learn more

Load video

Die Wiederaufnahme wird gefördert vom Fonds Darstellende Künste aus Mitteln der Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien im Rahmen von NEUSTART KULTUR. These additional performances are supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

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!

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!

 

ERUPTIVA EXTRAVAGANZA – A Volcanic Disruption

This vaudevillian solo performance evokes a collective eruption that illuminates the Zeitgeist of the catastrophic anew from a neo-surrealist and volcanological perspective echoing the Dance on the Volcano of the 1920s.

The volcano is an archaic monster and mystery. It catalyzes a collective sentiment of pent-up anger, encrusted hardenings, seething chasms and dissolves them all in a flaming spectacle. It unites decay and resurrection, filth and brilliance, unpredictable depths and catapulting heights – a striking and sparkling paradox.

With the solo performance ERUPTIVA EXTRAVAGANZA – A Volcanic Disruption, the performer Nolundi Tschudi impersonates the volcano as a drag-persona of the catastrophic. She dances on the edge of the abyss – dissecting the seductive power and bizarre poetry of the moment when everything threatens to vanish in destruction. In her lava glowing illuminations a neo-surrealistic scenario emerges, that dares to tread the fine line between vaudevillian lightness and performative, brute immediacy – unleashing an ecstasy that underlies the Zeitgeist of the 1920s and today.

 

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.

Vimeo

By loading the video, you agree to Vimeo’s privacy policy.
Learn more

Load video

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.

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