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Berlin International Performing Arts Center

Blog Archive

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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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

Army of Lovefuckers

We will kill you with a fucking piece of performance art

We are arming ourselves – internally and externally. Theater is our boot camp.

Packing explosives, puppets and projections, we set off down the path of the female warrior.

We envisage performance as a continuation of politics with adapted techniques and we are recruiting all female fighters who have gotten lost along the way: the time to rise up is now! Join the Army of Lovefuckers!

Lovefuckers are on a journey toward an effective yet bloodless technique for revolution that ties games, fantasy, reality and utopia together. The stage is a guerilla boot camp with futuristic elements where a female recruit is trained to join the Army of Lovefuckers by learning the pluralistic battle of becoming a societally aware performer. She demonstrates her fitness level, chooses role models, builds resilience and, over the course of specialized training, becomes intimately acquainted with her weapon: puppet theater. She discovers her personal puppet and enters into symbiosis with her. Unified as one, the puppet and the puppeteer voice their demands and follow the paths of their role models, such as the feministic cyborg theorist Donna Haraway or the Mexican freedom fighter Subcomandante Marcos, into a playful battle against repression.

Everyone in the audience is invited to join, provided they meet at least one of the recruitment criteria on the application form, which will be distributed before the performance.

A multimedia political show in between theater, dance, performance and puppet theater with ambivalence consciously factored in. The performance elaborates on warfare, the transformation of recruits into heartless killing machines, rebellion against social oppression and the presence of violence in the media. It is a piece that opposes the brutality of the world, thus combatting the paralyzing fears caused by ongoing and unending wars, the predominance of neoliberalism and global terrorism with irony and playfulness.

Or, to sum things up, it is a solo performance tackling serious themes using humorous means.

The Land of Milk(y) and Honey? Digital Edition

everything you ever wanted to know about being Israeli in berlin

but were afraid to ask…

Join us for a very special one-night-only experiment on December 1st at 8pm Berlin time for a completely digital adaptation of The Land of Milk(y) and Honey?: Israelis in Berlin.

Thanks to a generous grant from Fonds Darstellende Künste, we are reenvisioning our intimate dinner party performance as a Zoom conference to be enjoyed from the comfort of your living room. Bring your dancing shoes, a container of pudding and your curiosity with you; this is not TV theater; our intrepid performers will join us from three different countries, connected via the world wide web. Interaction is possible but never imposed.

The performance text was created from transcripts of interviews with 60 Israelis in Berlin – Jewish, Muslim, Arab, secular, straight, queer, those that eschew all labels and everything in between.

To fully participate in this performance, all audience members are asked to bring a single-serving container of pudding, one whole lemon, freshly ground pepper and four fresh mint leaves.

“I pity those who no longer remember the Holocaust and abandon Israel for a pudding.”

This statement, made by Yair Shamir, then Israeli Minister of Agriculture, to the Jerusalem Post in October of 2014, marked the climax of the so-called “Milky protest”. In a post that launched a thousand ships, the Facebook page Olim L’Berlin (Aliyah to Berlin) urged Israelis to move to Berlin due to a markedly cheaper cost of living. The primary evidence? Aldi’s Dessertcreme & Sahne, a dessert comparable to Milky, the dominant pudding brand in Israel, sold for less than a third of the price. This Facebook post received more than one million likes within four days and created headlines around the globe.

Nearly 75 years after the end of the Second World War, Berlin’s Israeli community is estimated to number in the tens of thousands and impossible to verify due to issues of multiple citizenship. Is Berlin truly this promised land of milk and honey?  Are people from Israel really immigrating here only because of the standard of living, nightlife and Berlin’s fabled cultural reputation? What about those Israelis who leave the country due to the current political climate? And what affects do 20th century history as well as multiple reports of rising antisemitism have on emigration from Israel to Germany?

Three Israeli performers explore these questions using verbatim text from 60 interviews with the widest possible spectrum of partners; Israelis with an active religious background, Israeli Arabs, highly politicized Israelis as well as Israelis who have absolutely no interest in politics.

The ID Festival is funded by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Szloma-Albam Foundation and KIgA e.V. – Kreuzberger Initiative gegen Antisemitismus