Sophiensæle

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Programme
Hendrik Quast
Spill your guts
HendrikQuast_SYG_Foto_Florian_Krauss-0644
March 31 | 19.00
April 01 | 19.00
Tickets
Performance
Festsaal | 15/10 €

A ventriloquist’s show of a different kind: In a dialogue with a chronically ill clap-mouthed puppet, Hendrik Quast explores the stubbornness of intestines. A relationship drama with scatalogical humor, parody therapy and ventriloquism unfolds between the ventriloquist and the sick doll. With tools of the performing arts, the events of chronic illnesses that often remain invisible are staged; opening up new humor spaces in which illness is no longer a taboo.

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April 01 02 | 17.00
April 04 | 20.00
Tickets
Hochzeitssaal | 15/10 €

Milliarden Jahre Widerhall was created after Naoko Tanaka’s travels to the contaminated area of Fukushima – a place where people’s connection to their habitat is forever destroyed. In a performative installation, Tanaka negotiates the ambivalent and conflicted relationship between humans and the earth, inviting us on a journey into inner landscapes.

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April 03 04 | 19.00
April 03 04 | 21.00
Tickets
Kantine | 15/10 €

Montag Modus: archive of futures presents a performance-installation set at the liminal space between film, dance and theater. Inspired by an encounter with three elderly dancers who were part of modern dance in Hungary in the 1930s, Figuring Age is a choreography of memories that explores how resilience, silences and traumas are inscribed in the body and in the movement.

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April 06 07 08 09 | 20.00
Tickets
Festsaal | 15/10 €

The choreographic concert We are going to Mars is dedicated to the history of the first African space program in Zambia. Created from video works by local artists in Uganda and the USA, it is being performed with live music by Mourning [A] BLKstar. 

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April 14 15
Tickets
Film/Video

The film version of The Making of Pinocchio is also available online as video on demand - for those who can't or don't want to come to the theater. The Making of Pinocchio is a queer re-appropriation of the tale of the lying wooden puppet who wants to be a “real boy”. Artists and lovers Cade & MacAskill reflect on MacAskill’s gender transition and their relationship. With their characteristic playful humour, The Making of Pinocchio moves skillfully between reality and fiction, fairytale and autobiography, the personal and the political. >> GO TO THE VIDEO VERSION

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April 14 15 | 19.00
Tickets
Festsaal | 15/10 €

The Making of Pinocchio is a queer re-appropriation of the tale of the lying wooden puppet who wants to be a “real boy”. In a technically innovative live film shoot, artists and lovers Cade & MacAskill reflect on MacAskill’s gender transition and their relationship. With their characteristic playful humour, The Making of Pinocchio moves skillfully between reality and fiction, fairytale and autobiography, the personal and the political.

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April 14 15 | 21.30
Tickets
Kantine | 15/10 €

The concert-performance accompanies the release of Astrit Ismaili’s first solo pop music album, produced by The Performance Agency in collaboration with Obsequeen, Lotic, Katu, Colin Self, Nömak, Europa and Mykki Blanco. The lyrics tell the story of a plant undertaking a physical and spiritual transformation to become the world’s First Flower. The project queers contemporary pop aesthetics and manifests how creativity can be a strategy to overcome existential limitations, echoing the artist’s own path.

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April 17 18 | 20.00
Tickets
Festsaal | 15/10 €

Sorour Darabi’s work engages with potentials of re-appropriation to uncover what is hidden by binary thinking. In a kind of futuristic mythology with roots in both visible and invisible, preserved and lost dance traditions, Natural Drama questions the concept of “nature”, exploring representations and constructions of the so-called female body.

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April 20 21 | 20.00
April 22 23 | 18.00
Tickets
Hochzeitssaal | 15/10 €

In this immersive work between performance and film, Liz Rosenfeld and their international, intergenerational team explore moments of change and transition. Through the story of the main protagonist, URSA, an unfillable hole, they reference the Greek myth of the constellations Ursa Major and Minor (the Big and Little Bear), while they consider their own bodies in transition.

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April 22 23 | 20.30
Tickets
Festsaal | 15/10 €

Untitled (Holding Horizon) is a choreography that continues Alex Baczyński-Jenkins’ engagement with negotiations of desire, the materiality of gestures, and affections of a queer commons. Through sensual, alienated gestures and the box step – a movement used in several social dances – synchronization, pleasure and alliance coexist with disorientation, limitation, and loss.

» more

April 27 28 29 | 20.00
April 30 | 18.00
Tickets
Festsaal | 15/10 €

There’s no business like show business. Melanie Jame Wolf and Teresa Vittucci ask: What does it take to make a show great? Both known for their intense solo work and powerful stage presence, the artists take a close look at popular entertainment, theater and the politics of spectacle. As a double act, they explore its tender intimacies, its power dynamics and the impact of audience and stage space on the show.

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April 28 29 30
May 01-08

Philosophiermaschine Online is an artificial intelligence that brings dead thinkers back to life. At the click of a button, the online audience enters into dialogue with Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Ernst Bloch and others, and can renegotiate their themes for the present: Freedom, dissidence, otherness, censorship, social utopia, hope - central concepts of postwar European philosophy.

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May 10 12 13 | 19.00
Tickets
Festsaal | 15/10 €

Every successful blockbuster needs a second part. For the Markus&Markus theater collective, that’s why TITANIC II has to take the stage. The sequel starts where the film left off: at the bottom of the sea. So, it needs sand, really a lot of sand. Every year, mankind consumes twice as much sand as all the rivers supply. The consequences of this overexploitation are tangible. TITANIC II is a collision course, a melodrama, a telegram from a sinking ship.

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May 11 12 13 14 | 21.00
Tickets
Hochzeitssaal | 15/10 €

Inspired by the made-up creatures and mythological figures of Acâibü’l-mahlûkat, Göksu Kunak explores notions of camouflage and self-censorship. This Persian cosmology book from the 13th century was translated to Ottoman and later in Turkish with a foreword of the current President. From a speculative perspective on the Middle East, Kunak examines (in)visibility and (in)concealment and the concept of taqiyya from Islam as hypercamoufl age.

» more

Specials

Specials
Festival

Queer Darlings 4

Grafik
© Jan Grygoriew

april 14–23

For the fourth and final time, Sophiensæle presents the popular spring festival series Queer Darlings, bringing old and new favorites to Berlin. The works of local and international artists deal with personal and socio-political moments of change, transformation, crisis and transition(s). To do so, they overwrite folk dances and narratives, fairy tales and myths from a queer perspective to create humorous, immersive, sensual and imaginative stage worlds beyond binary norms – and celebrate the potential of queer imagination for new visions of coexistence.  

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Anna Natt Queering Nosferatu

  • Anna Natt_final-3_Mayra Wallraff
    © Mayra Wallraff
  • Anna Natt_final-2_Mayra Wallraff
  • Anna Natt_final-17_Mayra Wallraff
    © Mayra Wallraff
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  • Anna Natt_final-9_Mayra Wallraff
    © Mayra Wallraff
  • Anna Natt_final-11_Mayra Wallraff
    © Mayra Wallraff
Performance/Sound Art
2022 October 27 28 29 | 20.00
2022 October 30 | 18.00
Festsaal

Premiere 

Little language

Vampires are sexy, elegant and well-integrated – at least that's what current pop culture suggests. Almost forgotten is the horror that first entered the cinema screen almost 100 years ago with the monstrous and simultaneously awkward figure of Nosferatu. In her new performance, Anna Natt, together with the composer and pipe organist Robert Curgenven, examines this particular vampire figure from F.W. Murnau's and Werner Herzog's films for its queerness: a being with non-normative desires who lives outside the heteronorm and whose grotesque movements recall the stiffness and loss of precision of aging bodies. Inspired by expressionist silent film, the monstrous, the insatiable, the vampire's too-much-ness meets the feminine – which in turn is itself defined in heteronormative discourses as the threatening "other." Within Curgenven’s live multichannel pipe organ composition, Anna Natt's Nosferatu awakens. Here he* may finally be and belong!

The play deals with the pleasure of biting and sucking blood.

If any questions remain from the following information, please feel free to contact Hannah Aldinger at barrierefreiheit@sophiensaele.com or 030 27 89 00 35. Please note that details may change by the day of the event.

The play lasts 70 minutes and uses English spoken language, English and German written language and German subtitles. It is suitable for audiences aged 16 and over. The audience will be seated in the dark during the performance. Floor fog, a coffin-like stage prop and an organ are used on stage. An creepy atmosphere is created. The music can be experienced physically in the play. Deep bass can cause vibration in the body. It gets loud in places. Several screens hang in the room on different levels. English and German text as well as bodies and individual body parts that move faster over time are projected onto them, overlapping at times. The piece concludes with a participatory part in which the audience can optionally get in touch with Nosferatu, the main character.

The audience area on the grandstand is seated. There are two wheelchair seats, which can be reserved according to availability or purchased in the online ticket shop or at the box office. If, for artistic reasons, the door to the auditorium does not open until very shortly before the performance begins, there is the option of early boarding. This is early admission for all people (especially those with visible or non-visible disabilities) who want a specific seat or a more relaxed entry. Early Boarding usually starts 10-20 minutes before the performance starts. The meeting point is next to the bar. Five minutes before Early Boarding begins, an on-site announcement will draw your attention to it once again. Our evening staff will be happy to help you find the meeting point.

You can also find more information about accessibility here. 

ANNA NATT received her training in traditional flamenco dance in Seville, Spain. Her stage performances, video works and interactive pieces have been shown internationally in theaters as well as galleries and alternative spaces. Beyond her dance training, she draws inspiration from various somatic and contemporary practices. In this way, she seeks to develop a deeper understanding of the body and its many facets. Another central theme in her work is the connection to trance and dream states.

ROBERT CURGENVEN produces albums performances and installations that emphasize physicality, our embodied response to sound and its correspondence to location, air, weather and architecture. Using such diverse means as pipe organ, turntables and dubplates, field recording through to feedback he has created works for National Gallery of Australia National Museum of Poland (Krakow), Palazzo Grassi (Venice), Transmediale (Berlin), National Sculpture Factory (Ireland) and festival performances including Sydney Festival, Maerzmusik (Berlin), Insomnia (Tromsø) and Sonic Acts (Amsterdam). Curgenven is an associate composer with the Contemporary Music Centre (Ireland) and guest lecturer in music and sound throughout Australia and Europe.

ARTISTIC DIRECTION, PERFORMANCE Anna Natt COMPOSITION, PIPE ORGAN Robert Curgenven VIDEO, VIDEO INSTALLATION Dalia Castel DRAMATURGY Maya Weinberg LIGHT DESIGN Loïc Iten CHOREOGRAPHIC OUTSIDE EYE Yalda Younes ARTISTIC COOPERATION, PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT Matthias Püschner

A production by Anna Natt in cooperation with SOPHIENSAELE. Funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds. With the kind support of Theaterhaus Berlin Mitte. Media partner: taz, die tageszeitung.