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.
“The playwright slyly examines the desire to submit to authority and the ways in which that impulse can be exploited by the clever and the charismatic. Soleimanpour, who was 29 when he wrote the play, translates these dark and disturbing themes into an outrageous parable involving vials of poison, rabbits and cheetahs, oh my. It’s an intoxicating stream of consciousness from the heart of Iran that will leave you at once amused and alarmed.” San Jose Mercury News
“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 !
U. Greetings from the Berlin welcoming committee in the form of meter-high graffiti adorning every available surface. One, ECHTER BERLINER !!!! IHR NICHT FUCK YOU, especially invites questions. What is a “real Berliner”? According to whom?
ECHTER BERLINER !!!! IHR NICHT FUCK YOU is a documentary theater piece exploring the diverging and converging experiences of so-called “expats”, often coming from comparably richer countries who travel to Berlin for self-realization, with those of so-called “immigrants”, often coming from comparably poorer countries for financial survival. At least, these are the generalizations.
“Nackt besser aussehen.” — Jiminy McFIT
The winners were:
An autobiographical one-man show that explores the miraculous and disastrous consequences of the choices we have a hand in making.
A contemporary ghost story that explores our fears around mortality, sexuality and the terrifying sense of responsibility that comes with having children.
“Today is a consequential occasion, and consequential occasions need witnesses.”
Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust as a one-woman-show featuring hand puppets and pop music. With an intense physicality, Bridge Markland performs high speed changes between Mephisto, Faust and Margarete/Gretchen using the puppets as her opponents. She acts to a sound collage made up of the text of the play and popular music from different generations.
presents its version of Lewis Carroll´s classic tale
“The first thing was the cold. Minus 14, bone chilling cold. I waited by the station watching the glide, almost silently along the tracks. I had forgotten the instructions. I didn´t know what train to get and i´d worn entirely the wrong kind of shoes.”