The Afro-German protagonist of Abdruckkörper (Imprinted Body) navigates his body within and away from the predetermined course. For, the direction, the trajectory is marked. German society is a historically constructed cultural labyrinth that produces visibility and exclusions, networks of relationships and clumps of capital. Whiteness is inscribed in the social disposition. The protagonist, the ego, lurches.
Abdruckkörper is the theatre debut of film director Yatri Niehaus. This dramatic script was created as part of the Unconventional Signs writing workshop at Ballhaus Naunynstraße during the 2020/21 season.
The protagonist of Eventually Causing the Shake is shaped by traversed landscapes and diasporic crossings. By lingering. And by dance. This is the medium to understanding the influences of the surrounding landscapes.
Eventually Causing the Shake is part of the dance series Wie ich werde, wie ich sein will (How I become, who I want to be) at Ballhaus Naunynstraße, in which three Black choreographers inquire about the important inspirations, solidarities, and connections for the empowerment of self-determined Black femininities.
Berlin and Los Angeles are places of longing, whose reputations promise self-determination and the freedom to create one’s own identity. But for whom? The protagonists make their way through an unwelcoming world. With her short film series AT THE SECRET SKY, AVA Irandoost creates compelling portraits of her protagonists and the cities they traverse – portraits of longing and self-assertion.
The eye of the cyclops is round ‒ like the lens of a camera. Whoever controls the eye rules!
In his directorial debut at Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Zé de Paiva merges all of his experiences as an actor, dancer, photographer and video artist. In an intermedial performance he and the dancer Nasheeka Nedsreal seek to distort the postcolonial configuration of images.
In The Melancholic Melody of the New Economy, the whisper becomes a narrative: under the direction of musician, composer, and multimedia artist Ariel William Orah, new Berliners who came from South Asia and Southeast Asia and found a job in Berlin with their English and computer skills create their own composition: Their navigation between job requirements, visa regulations, and role expectations, between past and future, between programming and self-determination, form the source code for the performance. At the same time, they provide insights into Berlin’s flagship industry in this musical-documentary theatre, including its transnational, (post-)colonial entanglements.
I see myself - in you! Are we so similar in our anger, our sorrow, our laughter, our courage? Because externally, in our interests, in our family stories, we are clearly different. And yet, I transcend myself when I experience you.
Everybody can be everybody can not be is a danced queer performance about exotization, energies of resistance and self-determined visibilities. Everybody can be everybody can not be is the queer everyday performance, back and forth between attack and defense, between self-protection and hypervisibility, it is the queer everyday performance of entering into confrontation, alone, together.
