Weaving together film, pre-recorded sound, live music and projections, the performance unravels into a mini-opera told through a series of audiovisual performative scenes.
Oh-My! is a 2-part show alluding to the representation of women in the 1950s: the oppressed woman vs. the “liberated” woman, represented by the Pin-Up Girl; kitschy fictitious women, trapped in ideas and thoughts dictated by a male-dominated society extreme to the point of near caricature.
The show is inspired by images from Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and comprised of video art, aerial acrobatics and the performance art of burlesque.
“I want to be honest with you. The only present I can offer.
I chose the place and the time. I share my world with you.
You are allowed to see what you want, it´s your time” Bianca to you
Sometimes we need illusions to survive and we create a world that doesn’t correspond to reality.
We need to stay in a comfortable space. We are scared to leave. We have fear. We want security. We escape in our mental constructions and we finally find ourselves again.
Balancing on the two levels of reality and dream, the piece focuses on the theme of identity. Using psychological violence, an apparently stronger person tries to confirm herself and her existence destroying someone who appears weaker.
Something wicked this way comes …
Berlin International Youth Theatre performs
a sinister tale of ambition, guilt and madness
In BIYT’s newest production we take a look at the corrupting nature of ambition and the destruction that stems from ruthless power.
Flattered, praised and rewarded as a hero, Macbeth encounters three witches who foretell of an even greater success. They predict his rise to the throne. This prediction prompts him, along with his wife, to secure his destiny by committing a series of murders, pulling them into a downward spiral of guilt and paranoia. Once violence is chosen as a means of achieving power, it proves impossible to stop and Macbeth’s inexorable loss of morality reminds us of how one evil minute can change a life forever.
Thunder! Lightning! Blood! Gore! Witches !
The piece explores our ongoing search for meaning in a world overrun by choices that seem to define our identities and feed our delusions of self-importance and grandeur.
Eleven theater enthusiasts from around the world living in Berlin, six months to prepare for the “big show”, the daunting search for a theme. But could it be that the key to Generation Y lies in the search itself? For the protagonists of this age, endless navel-gazing provides a potent addendum to the American Dream. The seemingly boundless avenues of success and personal fulfilment are compounded by a daily binge of self-glorification – or abasement – on social media. But is the innate task of forging our own destinies in fact a thankless struggle against influences beyond our control? Are we doomed to succumb to the powers that have shaped the lives of every generation before us?
International People’s Theatre Berlin is an ensemble that aims at creating original theater pieces based on devised material.
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…
“Say Yes!” is the motto of IMPRO 2014, the biggest festival for improvisational theatre in Europe. 40 artists from 14 nations present entertaining, contemplative, dramatic, hilarious moments, celebrating the spontaneous theatre in 28 shows: whipped impromptu on stage before the audience’s face.
English Theatre Berlin will present five shows:
At the beginning of the festival, we present the prelude race through the world of film. You ask for a horror film, a spaghetti western, soap operas or documentaries, Ancient Rome epics or “Berlin School” – the international cast tries to fulfill every wish. Great cinema on the theatre stage — a trip on the roller coaster of cinematic pleasure.
It is always a special show when spoken neither in German nor in English, but in French. For the first time the ensemble Impro Infini is our guest, who in turn host their own festival (Subito) in the city of Brest, with whom we are cooperating. Both French colleagues meet Kevin (Dad’s Garage/Atlanta) and Lucien Bourjeily (Impro Beirut). The four of them will not only be inspired by the charming suggestions of the audience, but also by the special lighting mood and sound effects – o la la.
The sound of a city has a very special tone. This night is all about funny and tragic moments in daily life of a big city. Special about the show is that the inspirations intensified(?) come from those, whose part for the success of an improv-night is mostly underestimated: the musicians – in this case Hannu Risku (Stella Polaris/Finnland), Gilly Alfeo (Die Springmäuse/Bonn) and Rudy Redl (Die Gorillas) – will inspire the actors with their instruments and soundfiles and will push them to the peak.
Two years ago we tried this for the first time, and beautifully enough a lot went wrong: cell phone cameras were streaming improvised events into the theatre (which most of the times worked out, but got stuck sometimes) where the thread was continued until the next switch to the outside crew, and so on. Those in the mood for an improvised adventure and touching moments (one of the most impressive moments developed when things went wrong, and the actors did not know they were filmed) are in the right show. We work in cooperation with the great nerds of ape unit and attempt the improvement of this format.
The main focus of the festival. After we gave ourselves over to various playwrights in 2011, this year’s focus lies on the improvisational transformation/conversion of two directors (R.W. Fassbinder und Quentin Tarantino) and two genres (“Romantic Comedy” and “Fantasy”). The festival ensemble rehearses these special improv formats in two-day workshops each and improvises them on two nights. In English Theatre, we will present to you two movies in the style of the genre Fantasy and the director Tarantino – but not without having asked the audience for their associations and suggestions of course!
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.
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.
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
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.
“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 !