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Women On A Mound

A woman is on stage.

What do we notice? What do we like? What do we see? Who is she? Does she have ambition? Does she belong? What is her status? Did she party last night?

Should she tell us a story? Sing a song?

Women on a Mound is a theatrical experiment, a choose-your-own-adventure inspired experience.

The performer asks questions. The audience answers. Partially improvised, part game show, part monologue.

Let’s get to know her. Would she complain if she was on the middle seat of a plane?

Followed by a post-performance discussion in cooperation with Theater Scoutings Berlin!

Celebrity Bound

Do you want to be famous? Do you want to be a star?

Success. Access. Excess. All of it can be yours.

You were born famous. It’s just that no one knows it yet.

Fashion. Fortune. Freedom. All of it is yours.

You don’t create fame. Fame creates you.

But do you have what it takes?

The trick. The secret. The rule book.

USA bred writer-director, Catherine Duquette, has the secret. In her interactive, one-woman show, Celebrity Bound, she’ll show you how it’s done. Over the course of three nights, blending movement, video, scripted and improvised text, as well as audience interaction, a star will be born. Who will it be? Perhaps YOU are the next hot celebrity.

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In a time dominated by social media, rapid data consumption and curated identities, Berlin-based performer and writer <strong>Catherine Duquette</strong> strives for closeness and connection. She specializes in audience-performer relationships, movement and improvisational scores. Her performances exact moments of heightened awareness and honesty on stage in an effort to dissolve the barriers that shape how we perceive and (dis)connect with the world around us. Her solo work has been supported by MOMENTUM Berlin, English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center, a Fulbright Fellowship in Spain, the International Festival of the Delphic Games in Greece and the Subterranean Art House in Berkeley, California. Catherine studied theater at Arizona State University and the British American Drama Academy in Oxford, England. She earned her master’s degree in Performance Studies from New York University prior to relocating to Germany. Despite frequent moves, Catherine calls the Sonoran Desert of Arizona home.

A Date With Catherine Duquette

A Date With Catherine Duquette is a live game / an improvised speed-dating event / a quest to find love in one hour or less!

This participatory performance explores love and attraction and the personas by which we pursue them. Catherine Duquette has created four distinct dating profiles based on four personas abstracted from her everyday identity.

YOU the audience are her date. You are full of possibility. You are an invitation for an intimate encounter, self-projection, or an awkward exchange. YOU the audience are also her competition. You are her gauge. You are an invitation for self-evaluation and self-deprecation.

YOU shape the way Catherine’s story unfolds. Laugh, lie, dance, and sigh. Expect to make one hot mess. Together, you and Catherine will explore the modern search for timeless romance.

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This work springs from the idea that social media and online dating sites have changed the way many of us look at love. Such platforms have created a hypermarket of desire, where users perform agency in the vast assemblage of potential mates. Users curate personal profiles, often tendering the best, most marketable versions of themselves, while identifying desirable partner attributes and browsing their options. Despite a clear commodification of self and relationships, we cannot dismiss online romance altogether as a mere commodified process of the “real thing”. In fact, its systems of commodification may help us understand and come to terms with the exact nature of attraction and the complexities of self-identification. Join Catherine to navigate love through a contemporary lens.

In a time dominated by social media, rapid data consumption and curated identities, Berlin-based performer and writer Catherine Duquette strives for closeness and connection. She specializes in audience-performer relationships, movement and improvisational scores. Her performances exact moments of heightened awareness and honesty on stage in an effort to dissolve the barriers that shape how we perceive and (dis)connect with the world around us. Her solo work has been supported by MOMENTUM Berlin, English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center, a Fulbright Fellowship in Spain, the International Festival of the Delphic Games in Greece and the Subterranean Art House in Berkeley, California. Catherine studied theater at Arizona State University and the British American Drama Academy in Oxford, England. She earned her master’s degree in Performance Studies from New York University prior to relocating to Germany. Despite frequent moves, Catherine calls the Sonoran Desert of Arizona home.

Blanche

“I don’t want realism. I want magic! I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth.” – that’s Blanche, a refugee of her past and an immigrant to a place where she has to fight for her survival.

Her desire for love, acceptance, but most of all for attention, leaves her looking for an audience – especially since she’s left alone in her own story. Blanche wants to enchant and become enchanted. And because there is no one left to play these games of hers, someone has to be invented. While Blanche is getting trapped in her own net of fantasy and illusion, she turns the audience into witnesses and conspirators, watching and subtly becoming part of her battle on truth and desires.

Blanche is based on the main character from A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. In the version by Lieberman and Strehl, a single character experiments with time, space and consciousness. Throughout, an abandoned Blanche exposes and transforms herself, vanishing from her own world into the world of her audience. The audience affects her decision and mirrors her acting. In return: the stage reflects what the audience projects, followed by a fascinating interplay of perception in which the boundary between reality and fantasy disappears.

Mars One: Venus Zero

MARS ONE: VENUS ZERO is a one-man show exploring the recent outbreak of “Meninism”, an ever-growing backlash against feminism and women’s rights.

The piece will follow our misguided protagonist, Mike, as he prepares his audition tape for the MARS ONE space program (designed to send four individuals to permanently live on Mars in the year 2024) while he ponders the state of the Earth today and his fear of the pending matriarchal takeover.

Using storytelling, music and projection MARS ONE; VENUS ZERO is a provocative piece of interactive theater using the absurd and ridiculous to highlight a real and ever present danger.

Gem Andrews

is an English writer, director and professional musician from Liverpool, UK and has been creating work across the UK since 2004. Gem also works within the participatory arts sector between Berlin and Newcastle upon Tyne, UK; facilitating music and writing workshops for young offenders and is particularly interested in creating theater work through the voices of society’s most disenfranchised, in particular the LGBTQ community and the British working classes.

Currently living and working in the Neukölln and Kreuzberg districts of Berlin, Gem’s ongoing projects include writing the score for Chicken Pox Fox’s upcoming play Betsey Ann and promoting her new critically acclaimed album of original songs, Vancouver.

Richard Gibb

Richard Gibb is a theater maker and storyteller from Aberdeen, Scotland and has been creating work in the UK since 2008. In Newcastle, England he was a part of several theater companies that created original and thought provoking work ranging from walkabout festival performances to immersive storytelling theater. In England, Richard also worked for 6 years in the participatory arts sector, using the context of theater to engage with a wide range of people, from children with disabilities, to adults struggling with homelessness.

Richard is most interested in creating work that is original, relevant and engages with the community in which it exists. He currently lives in Prenzlauer Berg and works all over Berlin.

Why Are We So F**king Dramatic?

Each year, scientists publish roughly 17,000 detailed descriptions of newly discovered animals.

Today we will investigate a new species: the young independent woman. Working with the humor and drama of this creature, this phenomenon is approached with a fake scientific sincerity, saying the obvious and revealing the unsaid.

Polar Opposites

2 parts comedy. 1 part tragedy. 1/2 table tennis. 1/4 mask theater. Entirely absurd.

Polar Opposites is a quirky fast-paced theatrical adventure about two polar bears confined to a drifting, melting iceberg. Faced with their own differences, an onslaught of environmental elements and some mild polar-bear-related existential crises, the two are left with a problem as deep as the ocean they float on.

This Is Torture

“Now then, we’ve done the questions, we’ve done the shooting. The ugly stuff. Well, probably not all of it.”

Inspired by (and, in part, adapted from) the 2014 U.S. Senate report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, This Is Torture presents a CIA interrogator on the other side of the table, answering to the voice of an investigative committee. The piece incorporates direct quotes and contextual details from the official senate report to both shed light on a particularly dark and disturbingly recent corner of US-American international activity and to involve the audience in an exploration of guilt, atonement and the unnerving instability of a banal evil. A look at the means, from beginning to the ends.

Connecting Fingers

An encounter with some refugees.

What would it be like if for one day, for one hour, for one minute we were to watch things through their eyes and hear what they want to tell us?

In attempting to connect with these stories, dancers will lead us on a second journey.

Between Lies and Harmony

4 years after FUKUSHIMA: Tons of highly radioactive water is spilling daily into the Pacific, the prime minister says everything is under control and Japan seems to be more concerned about hosting the summer Olympics in 2020 than the children attending schools in high radiation zones.

The official government scientific advisor to the residents in Fukushima says that ‘if you keep smiling, radiation won’t affect you”. Welcome to this mad world. Between Lies started as a dance theater piece in an anti-nuclear demonstration by Sayonara Nukes Berlin at Brandenburger Tor. Between the lies, the body tells another truth.