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Blog Archive

Four-Course Meal ~Hot Pot~

Chōri (調理, 조리, Kochen) is a collective of East Asian artists. Using culinary metaphors, Chōri Collective serves up a hot pot stage inspired by the Asian culinary culture where all dishes are placed together on one table, to get us through the long winter. Through the recipe, which is a living archive and a metaphor for score, three ingredients are simmering in the hot pot with the dreams of change. We welcome foodies and ingredients to our collective flavor journey.

In English, Korean and Japanese

Tender Horror

What do blizzards, hormonal changes and folklore have in common? How does ritual merge with our daily life?

Through surrealist ritual and the examination of the archetypal phases of the feminine, Tender Horror is brought to life.

Tender Horror is conceived of and developed by HOPEFULLY, MAYBE, an emerging international theater group consisting of Josje Eijkenboom, Maureen Gleason, Sigrun Hasselgård Bøe and special guest, Sunniva B. Johansen.

Presented as part of THE LAB, the artist and audience development series at ETB | IPAC, this first public presentation of new work-in-progress will be followed by a post-performance discussion.

Maureen Gleason is an actress and theater artist based in Berlin, Germany. She earned her BFA in studio acting with the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, MN where she studied the classical canon, voice and Roy Hart. After moving to London to study Shakespeare at the Globe Theater, she completed her MFA in Embodied Dramaturgy with Rose Bruford College London. Maureen specializes in dramatic vocal techniques and also works with textiles. (maureenlgleason.com)

 

 

 

Sigrun Hasselgård Bøe is a performer, choreographer and artistic collaborator based in Drammen, Norway. In 2020 she completed her two year-training of Advanced Devising Practice at Arthaus Berlin. In addition, Bøe has a MFA with a specialization in Performing Arts (2018) and a BA in Theatre Education (2016) from The University of Agder, Norway. Bøe is trained in the arts of physical theater and movement, and has a special interest in choreographed theater. She is currently working with the performance SKREI which is to be seen as part of the European Capital of Culture in Bodø 2024. (sigrunhasselgaardboee.com)

 

 

Sunniva Birkeland Johansen is a performer and director from the Lofoten Islands in Norway. In 2020 she completed an MFA in Advanced Devising Practice in collaboration with Rose Bruford College and Arthaus Berlin. She is currently based in Oslo where she works both in the theater and film industry. Sunniva is a part of the duo Birk/Bo produksjoner who focus on creating accessible theater in rural areas of Norway. In 2024. she will be directing and performing SKREI as a part of the “European Capital of Culture” in Bodø as well as continuing her work for Birk/Bo produksjoner. (sunnivabjohansen.com)

 

 

 

Josje Eijkenboom works as an actor and theater maker. She completed her Master Devised Theater and Performance in Berlin in 2019 (London International School of Performing Arts/Arthaus Berlin) She currently specializes in Physical Theater (Embodied Theater and the Poetic Body and Puppetry) Her predilection for Greek tragedies is often reflected in her work. After completing her Bachelor’s degree in The Netherlands (ArtEZ), she traveled to Brazil with TAMTAM Objektentheater, performing at Oerol and various other festivals. Currently she is working on various projects with Duda Paiva Company where she also performs Vergeten, dieren en Ver- loren zaken and Kinderen van het verdwenen Woud. Besides performing she also teaches aerial yoga and pole dance classes. (josje-eijkenboom.nl)

 

 

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.

 

 

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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.

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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.

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