photo: Thomas Aurin.
With clubs closed, events canceled, and generally December being a month mostly spent anticipating Christmas and shopping for gifts, there isn’t much to do in terms of entertainment and nightlife. Where is there? Well, like magic some of my most anticipated plays are having performances this month and I’m so excited because due to several blockages and the like I haven’t seen a lot of theater over the past 2 years and I miss it.
For avid iHeartBerlin followers and regular readers of our events guide, it might not be surprising that we are big fans of Constanza Macras. The Argentinian director and her company DorkyPark have given us many memorable evenings at the theater (or whatever location she chooses for her plays as it could very well be a forest or an abandoned industrial hall). So this month she has not just one but two of her big stage productions at Volksbühne and I really recommend you go. The West is an article about colonialism that was created last year and I saw it and it’s fantastic! The Future is his new production for this year, I haven’t watched it yet, and I will and I can’t wait.
Also on our list, Bibliomaniacs, a dance piece from a newly formed collective of female artists that we already had the good fortune to see last year and that we warmly recommend. He is playing this week at the Fahrbereitschaft in Lichtenberg. And finally, the opera that sparked our recent cocktail and cinema night at the Berlin Staatsoper: Sleepless is one of the Staatsoper’s contemporary productions which I think is a great opportunity for a younger audience to get started in the opera house and see how impressive a full show is. -the production of blown opera in one of Germany’s leading opera houses is in fact.
Book lovers
In BIBLIOMANIACS, six women create an exposed universe of words and movements where the two worlds compete to endure, to transcend each other. A beautiful poetry mixed with frank monologues and sexual fantasies brings us back to the past and the very present in a tense and fruitless dialogue. The unique physicality of BIBLIOMANIACS belongs to what Lisi Estarás defines as the language of the ape’s mind: the incessant chatter in our heads as we move from one thought to another, from one emotion to another, like a monkey. jumping from tree to tree chaotically. This physical language emphasizes a certain chance, the disconnection between the brain and the body, always confronting the very personal way of carrying out our actions, decisions, movements …
Itinerant Dance Ensemble is a constantly moving platform that connects dancers, directors and choreographers to generate excellent work opportunities for independent artists. After SOMETHING (2018), BIBLIOMANIACS under the direction of Lisi Estaras is Itinerant Dance Ensemble’s second production.
Thu, 16.12.2021, 19:30 h, Tickets
Fri, 12.17.2021, 7:30 p.m., Tickets
Sat, 18.12.2021, 7:30 p.m., Tickets
Fahrbereitschaft, Herzbergstrae 40, 10365 Berlin-Lichtenberg
photo: Thomas Aurin
Without sleep
“When it’s out of necessity, anything goes,” he says. You might be right, she said. “The place: Bergen, Norway. It is cold. It’s raining. Asle and Alida, very pregnant, take a walk in the coastal town. The young couple are turned away wherever they go. People like them are not welcome here. Each pause hides a new drift in a surreal psychological haze. Driven by despair, they break into a stranger’s house. A series of mysterious encounters in which the past comes to life turns out to be a catastrophic race against time.
Adapting a short story by the same title by Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, Hungarian conductor-composer Peter Eötvös, one of the most influential figures in new music today, composed “Sleepless” on commission. In it, he and librettist Mari Mezei interweave snapshots of the existential search for belonging, crime as a response to human indifference, and the struggle against feeling out of place, generating a sort of of suggestive and operatic stream of consciousness. The world premiere also marks the debut at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden of Hungarian film, theater and opera director Kornél Mundruczó, well known for his cinematically realistic works that often address contemporary social themes.
Thu, 16.12.2021, 19:30 h, Tickets
Berlin Staatsoper, Unter den Linden 7, 10117 Berlin-Mitte
photo: Gianmarco Bresadola
The future
Human beings have, through the ages, felt the need to predict the future. In ancient times, oracles were consulted, people read the bowels of sacrificial animals for prophecy, or looked at the constellation of stars in the sky. For many decades in the past, eccentric fortune teller Walter Mercado has prophesied about the future in popular television appearances, nowadays many astrology sites on the Internet are doing the job.
In the future, we will be looking at the future in the past and various theories of time, oracles and puzzles, and, in Karen Barad’s thoughts, the possibility that the past has not yet arrived. Perhaps the future has been slowly canceled again and again and all we have left is the endless, timeless reproduction of anachronisms.
Like in that club scene in a sci-fi movie: No matter when the movie is produced, it is forever portrayed as a club in the 1980s, when the doomsday clock read five minutes to midnight.
There’s a thunderstorm coming, said the man at the gas station. I know, I say, replays Sarah Connor.
Tue, 12.21.2021, 7:30 p.m., Tickets
Volksbühne, Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz 2, 10178 Berlin-Mitte
photo: Thomas Aurin
The west
The West is developing fictional worlds that deal with cultural imperialism and questioning ways of constructing visual landscapes, which have shaped socio-economic relations between South, East and West to this day. Exoticism emerges as a projection of Western wishful thinking and as an aesthetic exploitation of the foreigner in the empire of Western mass cultures. The American socialization of Latin America was at its peak between the 1970s and the 1980s. Film and television were powerful instruments of propaganda to project a certain world view directed against the Communist East: of Wonder Woman in today’s Homeland, these series were conducive to the dissemination of American strategies and ideologies. Also, working through the cracks of the lesser good was a way of showing us that if anything fell under the category of evil by the good, it was always for the greater good.
The West draws up a performative study of Western occupation strategies, reflects the didactic methods of cultural imperialism, and looks at Western societies as the dream factory of artificial authenticity.
Wed, 22.12.2021, 7:30 p.m., Tickets
Volksbühne, Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz 2, 10178 Berlin-Mitte
photo: Thomas Aurin
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through Franc
December 15, 2021
at the theatre