As we eagerly await the reopening of Berlin’s cultural venues, the Performing Arts Festival Berlin (25.-30.05.2021) is back with a pandemic-proof taster of what the city’s independent performing arts scene has to offer. With 100 digital and selected open-air events highlighting various venues and collectives, the festival covers the whole gamut of theater, dance, performance and even contemporary circus. The five-day program features the likes of Being Pink Ain’t Easy, an online dance performance from the Sophiensæle in which choreographer Joana Tischkau dives into the apparently macho world of rap music to pose questions on race and masculinity. This topic of stereotypes is also visited in Care Affair, a one-hour online performance hosted by the TD Berlin theater that looks at why care work is traditionally attributed to women.
The dance continues with Kiskeya, an interdisciplinary video performance that uses movement and sound to tell a colonial-tinged tale of Hispaniola, the Caribbean island now home to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Moving outdoors to East Berlin, Silent Moves is a series of sound recordings that tell the stories of Vietnamese people who emigrated to the GDR in the post-war period. Created with the help of Stasi files, the audio trail begins in Lichtenberg, which has long been a center of Vietnamese life in Berlin. Staying in East Germany, Red or Dead is an 85-minute film that revisits the GDR’s 41-year history by combining recordings of an eponymous 2017 theater series with archive footage from state-run film company DEFA. The stream is part of the festival’s Introducing… line-up, which highlights the work of Berlin’s young artists. You can check out the full line-up on the festival website.
Text: Benji Haughton / Credit: Joris Dragoman, Peter van Heesen, Schloss Bröllin & Gabriel Lora
We are giving away a pair of tickets each for the performances of Kiskeya and Care Affair. To win, send us an email with your full name, telephone number and Instagram account if you have one.
Performing Arts Festival Berlin (25.–30.05.2021) – for the full line-up and tickets see the festival website.
