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Programme
Tomorrow | 19:00
Claire Vivianne Sobottke
à mort – Ein choreografischer Liederzyklus für drei Stimmen
Claire Vivianne Sobottke-Foto_MayraWallraff_Presse_final-
March 22 23 24 25 | 19.00
Tickets
Dance/Performance
Festsaal | 15/10 €

à mort is a performative-musical exploration of processes of domination, dying and killing. Excessive scenes of destruction emerge in a memento mori inspired installation of natural and artificial materials. The female voice emerges as a powerful physical presence in a dying world, challenging the grotesque human desire for dominance.

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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.

» more

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.

» more

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.

» more

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.

» more

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.

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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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Cranky Bodies a/company Terrestrial transit - kick off

  • CRANKY~4
    © Michiel Keuper
  • CRANKY~1
    © Michiel Keuper
Dance/Discourse
2022 June 03 04 | 19.00
Festsaal
in English

The shows will be photographed and filmed and the audience might be clearly recognizable on the photos and video.

The interdisciplinary project Terrestrial Transit deals with the activist practice of artistic intervention, which is gaining importance again in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, in view of the strengthening of right-wing authoritarian regimes. Drawing on the artistic and autobiographical experiences of its ensemble members, the project refers primarily to political forms of protest in the tradition of Polish and Hungarian dance and performance art before 1989 - and asks about their significance today.

While the first evening of the kick-off in the Sophiensælen will focus on questions about current queer-feminist protests and their relation to history, the second evening will deal primarily with the critical potential of withdrawal and subtle moments of withdrawal: conversations, improvisation, dance and music, autobiographical memories and historical events flow into each other and thus form the starting point for a search for traces of political protest in Polish and Hungarian dance and performance art, for alternative forms of participation and resistance.

The kick-off weekend marks the beginning of a choreographic journey from Berlin via Ponderosa/Stolzenhagen via Szczecin to the Baltic Sea, which will be documented by filmmaker Stella Horta in the form of a cinematic diary. A final performative audiovisual installation will take place in October at DOCK 11 in Berlin.

GUESTS JUNE 03 Katarzyna Sitarz, Joanna Leśnierowska
GUEST JUNE 04 Boglárka Börcsök

PLEASE NOTE: THE SOPHIENSÆLE ELEVATOR IS CURRENTLY OUT OF ORDER. THE FESTSAAL CAN ONLY BE REACHED VIA THE STAIRS.

If any questions remain from the following information, please feel free to contact Gina Jeske at jeske@sophiensaele.com or 030 27 89 00 35. Please note that the accessibility information is subject to possible changes.

The event lasts about 3 hours including intermissions and consists of performances, talks, video works, lectures and more. The primary language is spoken English. Seating options are chairs, cushions and beanbags. The beanbags as well as two wheelchair spaces can be reserved by phone or purchased at our online ticket store or at the box office, if available. If you require specific seating of any other kind, please arrive 20-30 minutes prior to show time and approach our evening staff.

Click HERE to find information about performance spaces and pathways, accessible restrooms, parking, directions to the theater, a 360° video tour of the building, and more.

In August 2020, Peter Pleyer and Michiel Keuper founded the dance company CRANKY BODIES A/COMPANY with the support of DOCK11/EDEN. Based on their long-standing collaboration, which dates back to their student days in Arnhem (NL), their projects combine Peter's choreographic work and Michiel's visual compositions, including costume and spatial design and photography. Over the years, they have assembled a group of international performers and artists who collaborate with them in projects such as the HKF-funded ensemble works visible undercurrent (2014) and cranky bodies dance reset (2017), as well as the ongoing Berlin-Polish exchange project moving the mirror (from 2016).

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ARTISTIC DIRECTION Peter Pleyer, Michiel Keuper PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT Madga Garlinska COSTUME, SET Michiel Keuper ASSISTANCE COSTUME Juliane Länglin FILM Stella Horta VIDEO Victoria Martínez (in collaboration with Stella Horta)SOUND/MUSIC Marc Lohr DRAMATURGY Jette Büchsenschütz DRAMATURGY, SCIENTIFIC ACCOMMODATION Kirsten Maar DANCE/PERFORMANCE Eszter Gál, Marysia Stokłosa, Aleksandra Borys, Mor Demer, Bjørn Ivan Ekemark/ Ivanka Tramp, Caroline Neill Alexander, Ka Rustler GUESTS Joanna Leśnierowska a. o. 

A production by Cranky Bodies a/company in coproduction with SOPHIENSÆLE. Funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds with the support of DOCKART. Media partner: taz. die tageszeitung.