Sophiensæle

Calendar

Programme

Programme
Today | 20:00
Lecken
Queer Social Reproduction
Lecken©Souad_Hervé 02
June 01 | 20.00
Other
Kantine | Eintritt frei

What are the actions, responsibilities, and relationships that go into queer world-making, and who is doing this labor? The queer-feminist rave collective, Lecken, devotes the second issue of their zine, Queer Social Reproduction, to these questions, along with an evening program surrounding its launch.

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Tomorrow | 18:30
Freddie Wulf mit Alicia Jane Turner
we are all made of stars
stars_freddie wulf_credit manuel vason Fierce 2022_pink2
June 02 | 18.30
Performance
Hochzeitssaal | 15/10 €

we are all made of stars is a journey through the body as a living landscape. Performed in a bathtub using an endoscopic camera, movement & lip-sync, Freddie Wulf explores the close-up textures of body, water and plant. Inspired by philosophies of vital materialism, the show combines visual languages from body horror and nature documentaries, moving between atmospheres of discomfort, dis/connection, and bliss. With a live sound score by Alicia Jane Turner.

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Tomorrow | 23:00
Lecken
Queer Social Reproduction
Lecken©Souad_Hervé 01
June 02 | 23.00
Rave
Kantine | 15 €

The queer-feminist rave collective, Lecken, features on the second day of their program the foremost prefigurative practice of queer worlding – an all-night rave expanded with dance performances, public sculpture, and light installations.

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June 08 09 | 19.30
Tickets
Hochzeitssaal | 15/10 €

“Main character syndrome” is a social media/pop culture invention in which a person behaves as if they were the main character of a fictional story. The performance uses this notion to explore and challenge senses of selfhood and togetherness in times of pornographic narcissism. It blurs the lines between personal and fictional, experienced and represented, individual and relational.

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June 08 09 | 21.00
Tickets
Festsaal | 15/10 €

Criptonite is a crip-queer theatre project by Edwin Ramirez and Nina Mühlemann. In their current manifestations as Dionysos and Medusa, they invite the audience into the underworld. Surrounded by the rivers of hatred, wailing, fire and oblivion, we find ourselves on the islands of pleasure, celebrating the intersection of pain, pleasure and kink. What does it mean to negotiate consensual giving and receiving together in a pleasurable way, through movement and care? Where do we find moments of pleasure despite pain or exhaustion? 

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June 10 | 15.00
Eintritt frei

With the Sophienstraßenfest we call the neighborhood around the Sophiensæle into the street. For one day we celebrate the neighborhood of Spandauer Vorstadt, its residents and their stories. In the afternoon, neighborhood choirs (Kiezchöre) sing in Sophienstraße and a photo exhibition shows its transformation. For the crowning finale, we invite you to a joint street dinner in the evening: everyone brings their own seating furniture, dishes and culinary delights of choice – with just enough for your direct neighbors to enjoy as well. Together with neighbors and guests, we form the longest dinner table in Berlin.

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June 12-16 19-23 26-30
July 03-07 10-14
Performance

After the success of The River I in the summer of 2022, this special boat tour now returns on Berlin’s waters. The team surrounding Aimé C. Songe invites you to an encounter in a rowing boat, alone or in pairs with a friend or loved one, just in time for sunset. Together with various artists, participants embark on a dreamlike journey to question the concept of an active and productive life, while to taking time to unwind.

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June 13 | 16.00 - 21.00
June 14 | 18.00 - 21.00
June 16 | 16.00 - 22.00
June 17 | 18.00 - 22.00
Kantine | Eintritt frei

Sickness Affinity Group (SAG) is a group of art workers and activists who work on the topic of sickness/disability and/or are affected by sickness/disability. In a cozy installation – with places for rest and hanging out, stimming and wiggling – SAG now looks back on their six years of existence. At the Zine-Library, in collective co-writing and co-reading sessions or group meditations: We invite you to share sick, sleepy, caring crip time with us.

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June 13 14 | 19.00
Tickets
15/10 €

Lay Me Low looks at the terror of standing still and standing up for yourself or others when physical and emotional balance is a struggle. The performance also ponders on why taking a break, resting and cutting oneself some slack is such a pain today. Hence it looks at the techniques, as well as joys and fears of going down and feeling horizontal.

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June 13 14 | 20.30
Tickets
Festsaal | 15/10 €

EveryBody’s Fantasy explores erotic fantasies and questions how we look and experience them. The performance is inspired by Gertrude Stein’s 1937 Everybody’s Autobiography. Considering the biographical, the life-lived as an accessible format for others to enter, visit or witness with care and understanding, this work looks toward what would happen, what we could anticipate happening again and the fantasy that rests just beside.

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June 14 | 16.00 - 18.00
Kantine |

The collaborating queer BIPoC disabled group KIWI – Knowing institutions from within invites to an open meeting in the SAG space on Wednesday June 14. The group, hosted by Tizo All, is an attempt to bring folks to share their experiences in working with institutions.

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June 14 | 22.00
Eintritt frei

This self-governed talk between Liz Rosenfeld and Jen Rosenblit offers an encounter to reflect on what it is to hold one’s own flesh and what it is to witness that intimacy. What these two artists show and how they show it in their work. The functions of their bodies as desired objects and how they approach similar topics from completely different practices and perspectives. What are their magics and how do they enact them?

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June 16 17 | 19.30
Tickets
Hochzeitssaal | 15/10 €

Planets, water, plants, inanimate objects, human animals – everything vibrates and resonates with each other. In different states we vibrate differently: in sadness differently than in joy, in fear differently than in ecstasy. Siegmar Zacharias, together with scent alchemist Liza Witte, textile artist Lea Kieffer, and musician Steve Heather, invites us to listen with our whole bodies and become a space of collective transformation as resonant bodies for one another.

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June 16 17 | 21.30
Eintritt frei

h0chbegabt deal with social structures and translate them into humorous fantasy worlds. Their latest work, VAMPIRE(N), is a mockumentary about the casting and production process of the new vampire film “Vampires in the Dark”. The mockumentary portrays two potential protagonists – real vampires – and provides insight into their lives. We accompany the two and the beginning of their special friendship in the face of discrimination and prejudice.

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June 16 17 18 23 24 25 | 22.30
Tickets
15/10 €

Who has always used the night as a place of resistance? What rituals were and are practiced under the protection of the night? Inspired by the “Take back the Night” demonstrations
that have been taking place on Walpurgis Night since the 1970s, the result is an interactive audio night-walk about nocturnal politics of pleasure and lust. Inspired by the figure of the witch, the young ensemble explores the allure of the night in hidden places in Berlin’s urban space, re-enacts various rituals, tests utopias and conquers the night.

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June 17 | 16.00 - 18.00
Kantine | Eintritt frei

Since 2021, Sickness Affinity Group (SAG) has organized a regular reading group engaging with critical thinking in queer and crip studies. In their first in-person reading group session, to be held at Leisure and Pleasure, they will collectively investigate ideas and feelings around different experiences intertwined with walking.

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June 17 | 22.00
Tickets
Concert
Festsaal | 15/10 €

Hans Unstern's lyrics oscillate between modern fairy tales, criticism of the myth of the binary gender system and of their own working conditions in capitalism. A concert between lyrical softness and punk moments, from pompous slide harp clouds to improvised free sequences.

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June 22 23 24 25 | 20.00
Tickets
Hochzeitssaal | 15/10 €

In Vanilla three performers explore the relationship of pleasure, sexual desire and food to question normativity in sexual practices.Through the intimate and vulnerable sharing of personal and fictional sex stories, the performance conducts a warm and soft exercise of imagination.

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June 23 24 | 20.30
Tickets
5 €

In this immersive live work, fragmented landscapes are built and unbuilt; transforming the basement of Sophiensæle into a dark room where people are invited to move through, cruise and lounge together. Inspired by the defiance of communal gatherings, public sex and specifically the politics of taking up space, an*dre neely and Liz Rosenfeld consider their own differently-gendered, differently-aged, differently-transitioning bodies and relationships. They are bound by notions of chosen family and resonating with desires of how to care for and be cared for by one another, or how to carry and tell each others stories.

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June 24 | 16.00
June 24 | 18.00
June 25 | 11.00
June 25 | 13.00
June 30 | 19.00
July 01 | 19.00
June 30 | 21.00
July 01 | 14.00
Tickets
Kantine | 15/10 €

Colonastics is the world’s first fitness workout without the exoticizing bullshit of Zumba, the pseudo-spiritual, esoteric shenanigans of white yoginis and neo-colonial appropriations! Why? Because it feeds solely on the physicality of white cultural practices. Stiffen your joints, throw your limbs around uncontrollably and perfect your air guitar. Feel white supremacy flowing through our collective consciousness and become part of a movement that will revolutionize the fi tness world!

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June 28 29 | 19.00
Tickets
Festsaal | 15/10 €

Orientation is the perception of space through the body. Ceylan Öztrük, who received the 2022 Swiss Art Award, proposes a rethink of spatiality through disorientation. As disorientation involves becoming an object or a sculpture, a dreamy perception is created by text, choreography, costumes and an impressive stage installation. A narrative unfolds about the collision and fusion between the body and the building, the person and the institution, the bent and the stiff.

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June 29 30 | 20.00
July 01 | 16.00
Eintritt frei

In the Leisure Garden of Sophiensæle, a temporary island of the unblessed is being created. Nuray Demir invites to bar-chat conversations about loss, death, collective melancholy, and resistance.

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June 30 | 18.00 - 23.00
July 01 | 18.00 - 23.59
Hochzeitssaal | Eintritt frei

Rest Rebellion sets up a space for rest in a calm, low-stimulus environment and offers a training camp for those who want to learn more about the transformative quality of resting. 

» more

July 01 | 15.00
July 01 | 18.00
Eintritt frei

In 2020, a group of suddenly unemployed Berlin-based dancers started to regularly meet in public space to play Double Dutch – a rope-skipping game played with two ropes swung in opposite directions. What started as a response to the Corona lockdowns, has since blossomed into an ongoing practice where five artists regularly explore the jumping game’s connection to club culture – from early hip hop to techno; but also joy, creativity, non-productive artmaking, playfulness and togetherness as a safe haven within the twisted lifestyle of freelance dancers.

» more

July 01 | 20.30
Various Locations | Eintritt frei

For the festival and season closing, the Sophiensæle open their backyards and bars to everyone from 15 h. There will be an artistic program, drinks, snacks – and from 20.30 h also major and minor gala moments and surprises with artists, the Sophiensæle team and many friends. 

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Specials

Specials
Festival

Leisure & Pleasure

SOP_LEI+PLEA_Grafik_HP_2
© Jan Grygoriew

MAY 25–JULY 01

As a joyful finale of the last season under the artistic direction of Franziska Werner, Sophiensæle invites you to a festival on the political dimensions of Leisure & Pleasure. For six weeks, the festival explores the connections of pleasure and activism, questions art’s ability to heal societal exhaustion – and dreams of life beyond work.

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News

TANZTAGE BERLIN 2024 | SAVE THE DATE

SOP_TATA23_1200x900_SCHWARZ_pur
Jan Grygoriew

The next edition of Tanztage Berlin is currently planned for 4-20 January 2024, and it will again take place under the artistic direction of Mateusz Szymanówka. This year's open call will be published at the beginning of August.

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Vanessa Stern & Team ToFuR® – Theater ohne Furcht und Reichweite

  • Vanessa Stern_Foto_Dietmar Schmidt_Presse
    © Eike Böttcher
  • 5_(Ursula Renneke )_(c) dietmar schmidt
    © Dietmar Schmidt
  • 7_ Ursula Renneke und Barbara Wölfle)_(c)dietmar schmidt
    © Dietmar Schmidt
  • 2_(Anna Alsheva)_(c)dietmar schmidt
    © Dietmar Schmidt
  • 3_(Maika Knoblich)_ (c)dietmar schmidt
    © Dietmar Schmidt
  • 8_ Ursula Renneke und Maika Knoblich)_(c)dietmar schmidt
    © Dietmar Schmidt
  • Vanessa Stern _Tofur_Foto_MayraWallraff-14
    © Mayra Wallraff
  • Vanessa Stern _Tofur_Foto_MayraWallraff-40
    © Mayra Wallraff
  • Vanessa Stern _Tofur_Foto_MayraWallraff-49
    © Mayra Wallraff
  • Vanessa Stern _Tofur_Foto_MayraWallraff-88
    © Mayra Wallraff
  • Vanessa Stern _Tofur_Foto_MayraWallraff-111
    © Mayra Wallraff
Theatre
2023 March 16 18 | 20.00
2023 March 19 | 18.00
Hochzeitssaal

Premiere

In German

March 16 | Artist Talk after the show. 

Vanessa Stern is getting out of hand. She boldly shouts: Social media, you are my enemy! and gathers knights around her, along with cute ponies who can barely see anything with their hair in front of their eyes. In ToFuR® they go into battle against the dark forces of reach and attention. Theater without clicks and shares and likes! If life isn't a pony farm, at least the theater can be one, an analog gathering place where we produce virtually no usable data for an hour or two. Might as well be tilting at windmills, but hey, wasn't that fun before? Just pay full price, with us you don't have to save any of what you can spend. Promotional codes are not valid, you won't miss a bargain. You don't have to rate your stay with us, nor do you have to state how you found out about us. There is always someone on stage, and those who ride out come right back in. You do not need GPS. Be there when no one is following us!  There’s another world every day.

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. Therefore, if you find out after you have purchased your ticket that the performance is no longer accessible to you, you can contact us for a ticket return at ticketing@sophiensaele.com or 030 27 89 00 45 until 5 business days after the event (Monday through Friday between 10am and 6pm).

Duration

  • 2 hours

Language

  • German spoken language

Stage

  • White dance floor

Light

  • At one point: strobe light
  • At one point: sudden change of light from dim to very bright
  • Some soft, colored light changes

Sound

  • the performers are amplified with microphones that sometimes crackle or feedback
  • at one point: tinny thunder sounds
  • at one point: loud, angry screams
  • interludes of music and dialogues from the movie "Die Mädels vom Immenhof" (The girls from Immenhof)

Audience area

  • The last row of the grandstand is seated (free choice of seats)
  • All other rows are with seat cushions on the floor

Early boarding
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.

Tickets

  • Reservations can be made via the ticket telephone at 030 283 52 66, Monday to Friday from 4pm-6pm
  • Via the online ticket shop
  • At the box office

You can also find more information about accessibility here.

VANESSA STERN, actress, founder of Krisenzentrum für weibliche Komik, has worked continuously since 2011 within the framework of her project Heulen kann jede - weibliche Komik in der Krise at Sophiensæle. Her productions Das Kapital der Tränen and Die Umschülerinnen oder Die Komödie der unbegabten Kinder were each nominated for the Friedrich Luft Prize and her theatre film Sleeping Duties - Probleme sind eine gute Lösung was nominated for the nachtkritik Theatertreffen in 2021. She regularly produces episodes of her large comedy lab show format La derniere crise - Women on the Edge of Comedy at the Festsaal der Sophiensæle. heulenkannjede.de

URSULA RENNEKE has been a freelance actress since 2000, mostly in Berlin. In 23 years, she has facilitated 55 theatre productions at independent stages, municipal and state theatres, as well as 30 film productions for cinema and TV. In 2017, she founded "zePPra", with which she supports productions of the independent performing arts and, in addition to her teaching activities at Berlin drama schools, organises acting courses. She has worked with Vanessa Stern for over 10 years on stage and in front of the camera, under extreme conditions: including off Spitsbergen, in Schiller's crypt, on horseback and without free time.
ursularenneke.net & zeppra.jimdosite.com

MAIKA KNOBLICH (1986) is a performance maker, performer and lighting designer. Since 2009 she has formed the performance duo Quast & Knoblich with Hendrik Quast. She has been working as a lighting designer and dramaturg since 2010, among others with Olympia Bukkakis, Emmi-Lou Rößling, Barbara Schmidt-Rohr, SKART, Vanessa Stern, Karol Tyminsk and Jeremy Wade. She studied at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen (B.A. 2010) and at DasArts (now DAS) in Amsterdam (Master 2013) and is a feedback coach for the DAS Feedback Method (feedback in artistic processes). Portfolio: www.quastknoblich.de

ANNA ALSHEVA studied German at the National Taras Shevchenko University and followed an acting training at Misha Kostrov's Actors Studio. She has performed in improvisation theatre Chornyi Kvadrat and ProEnglish Theatre, among others. After her biggest premiere in March 2022 could not take place due to the war, she is happy to be back on stage. 

ELSA BRABENDER, who has lived in Berlin since 2013, is a psychotherapist specialising in psychoanalysis and family therapist. Until 2013, she taught German, history, politics and psychology in Tübingen and trained trainee teachers as a subject leader for educational psychology. From her painful experiences as a former 68-year-old, she rejects all dogmatism. It is important to her to fight against forgetting and repression and to critically examine the current political and social situation.

Ulrike Hentschel studied social sciences and education in Bochum and was a teacher in North Rhine-Westphalia. She has lived in Berlin since 1987. She studied theatre education at the University of the Arts and taught until 2020. In the meantime, she travels a lot, takes photographs, reads and writes.

GERHILD ARJES studied psychology in the 1970s, then worked as a research assistant and later as a psychotherapist with couples and individuals for 35 years. She has meanwhile hung up her profession, sings passionately in the women's choir the "Fixen Nixen", reads contemporary literature quickly and a lot and loves to sink into play with her grandchildren. In search of profound nonsense, she has landed on the stage.

SUSANNE STALLMANN left the school service for good shortly after her tenure as a joyless teacher of arts and crafts in Hesse at the end of the 1970s and then tried her hand at various jobs: restaurant assistant, secretary, tour guide. In 1983, as a member of the tingling off-theatre group "Preddy Show Campany" in Berlin, she found her late joyful destiny and meagre but regular earnings. After that, she and a colleague founded the artists' agency Rampensau, which she helped run until retirement. She fills her free time with political activity with the "Omas gegen Rechts" ("grannies against the right"), with travelling, and with participation in changing choir and theatre projects in Berlin.

BARBARA WÖLFLE, nurse, has been in retirement since 2015. Born in 1949; the FRG and the GDR were founded in the same year. Her choice of profession resulted from her desire to earn her own money and leave the confines of provincial Bavaria behind. Years of exhausting back-breaking work followed; recreational breaks in nature and garden, children and family breaks and singing in the choir. Inspiration and life support came from working on poetic texts in calligraphic style and playing with words and fairy tale images. She really finds time to cultivate these hobbies now that she has been allowed to get off the hamster wheel of the working world. Being on stage as a comic old woman will be a new experience.

DIETMAR SCHMIDT, literary scholar at the University of Erfurt, has worked as a dramaturge with Vanessa Stern since 2012. Book publications include: The Physiognomy of Animals. From the Poetics of Fauna to the Knowledge of Man.

EIKE BÖTTCHER lives in Berlin and came to stage design via architecture. In recent years he has worked with Vanessa Stern, Bernadette LaHengst, Zachary Oberzan, Eva Löbau, Ligia Lewis, Clement Layes and Lunatiks, among others. His hobbies are designing sailboats, playing the trumpet and cycling.

JESSICA BRAUN is a costume designer, art therapist and globetrotter. After studying costume and stage design in Hamburg, Barcelona and London, she first worked as a stage and costume designer and lighting designer for the independent theatre scene in Barcelona. She has lived in Berlin since 2005 and works internationally as a freelance costume designer for film and television and recently also for the theatre again with great pleasure.

EVA-KAREN TITTMANN works in the independent scene, at permanent venues and for a wide variety of institutions as a freelance cultural manager. She has worked with Vanessa Stern for many years.

JANNE LILKENDEY has been working as an assistant director and dramaturg for Vanessa Stern since the beginning of 2022. She gained the necessary versatility through her involvement in the youth theatre Meine Bühne, through part-time jobs at the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, the Goethe Institute Addis Ababa, KiKa and as a student assistant. She is doing her doctorate in the literary studies programme: "Texte. Signs. Medien" in Erfurt and is co-editor of the magazine LIT ERA TUR.

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DIRECTOR Vanessa Stern DRAMATURGY Dietmar Schmidt STAGE DESIGN Eike Böttcher COSTUME Jessica Braun LIGHTING Maika Knoblich PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT Eva-Karen Tittmann ASSISTANT DIRECTOR Janne Lilkendey PERFORMERS Vanessa Stern, Ursula Renneke, Anna Alsheva, Maika Knoblich, Gerhild Arjes, Susanne Stallmann, Barbara Wölfle, Elsa Brabender, Ulrike Hentschel

A production by Vanessa Stern in co-production with SOPHIENSÆLE. Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, as part of NEUSTART KULTUR / in the program #TakeHeart Prozessförderung. With the kind support of the Heinz und Heide Dürr Stiftung. Media partner: taz.