In the piece, which is both music theatre and dance performance, the audience itself becomes part of a living sound installation. Electronic sounds emanate from their own mobile phone loudspeakers, which change depending on the distance to the performers and merge into a single collective body of sound.
Inspired by the historical phenomenon of dance frenzy - the solo dance mixes ecstatic eruptions with pounding beats and is party, spoken word concert and expression of physical madness to exhaustion all in one.
Faye Driscoll stands alone on stage but creates a dynamic group experience. She is part of a complex installation, is wired for sound transmission and is supported by pulleys, ropes or the weight of others.
For the first time in Germany, the festival Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer presents a work by the Sāmoan/Pākeha artist Pelenakeke Brown. With her collective of disabled artists, she takes a new look at aesthetics and the art of the disabled body in this interdisciplinary performance.
September 09 10 | 21.00 September 11 | 16.00
Tickets
Hochzeitssaal | 15/10 €
Can a voice message be more intimate than a nude photo? Together with composer Marta Forsberg, Sindri Runudde explores the concept of voicemail and the culture of auditory versus text-based SMS: A Sensoral Lecture is all about auditory romance and love at first frequency - an exploration of sound and especially the voice as a form of touch.
September 13 | 14.00 - 18.30 September 14 | 11.00 - 15.30
Festsaal | 10/20/30/40 €
Join Quiplash to explore what it means to integrate audio description into performance, queerly. The workshop takes place over two relaxed half-day sessions (with breaks) at the Festsaal of Sophiensæle.
September 15 | 20.00 September 16 17 | 18.00
Tickets
Kantine | 15/10 €
Anajara Amarante takes the audience into their queer version of South American surrealism and creates entire dance landscapes out of it: Closely connected to the artists, the audience experiences a crescendo evening that is both visual protest and ritual celebration.
Welcome to Unsightly Drag and Friends: Quiplash invites the audience to a dazzling and somewhat different evening of cabaret! Between musical and stand-up comedy, abstract worlds and smooth moves the ensemble of Queer Crips (short: Quips) show us how sexy the mix of entertainment and access can be.
September 23 24 | 19.00 September 26 27 | 20.00
Tickets
Hochzeitssaal | 15/10 €
In the dance performance TENNIS, Angela Alves examines sport, art and society for ableist and classist patterns of discrimination; exploring methods to confront them without losing her nerve. In the setting of a tennis court, the dancer takes up the racket and prepares to serve for an accessible future.
September 23 24 | 21.00 September 24 | 14.00 September 25 | 16.00
Tickets
Festsaal | 15/10 €
Sheena McGrandles’s successful experimental musical is back: Between concert, spoken word and performance, one ensemble together with a small choir of childless people speculates on new ways of starting a family!
September 30 | 19.00 October 01 02 07 08 09 | 19.00
Tickets
Festsaal | 28/18 €
The children Charlotte and Felix emerge from the sea and play as their dead parents on the beach. It's a ritual the two have been practicing for years. In memory of their parents' wild exuberance, they put sunscreen on their backs and tickle each other until they can hardly breathe. For brief moments,all sadness falls away from them. Again and again, however, the different needs of the two ten- and eleven-year-old siblings break into the game.
In Let's Just Be Friends, Simone Dede Ayivi interviews people who live their friendships as a feminist counter-concept to family businesses or marriages: Friends who do projects together or take on responsibilities for each other that are usually attributed to the close family context or romantic relationships between two people.
With Radical Minimal, the Berlin-based Company Christoph Winkler explores the radical potential of minimal music and contemporary dance. In three choreographies, the team reinterprets three well-known pieces of minimal music: Come Out by Steve Reich, Coming Together by Frederic Rzewski and Stay on it by Julius Eastman.
Lois Alexander explores the afterlife of slavery and the reverberations on our present.Yeye explores memory, traces and notions of a motherland, moving through different levels of video, text and performance.
If you want to get to know the history of Sophiensæle, join one of our guided tours. Regular guided tours are in German. English guided tours are available for groups of five people or more.
The international festival Tanz im August, presented by HAU Hebbel am Ufer, is once again showing a full three-week programme with international and local choreographers from different generations. From August 5–27, 2022 a total of 21 productions with around 200 artists from over 25 countries are being shown in 87 performances at HAU Hebbel am Ufer and 6 other venues in Berlin.
For the first time in Germany, the Sophiensæle will bring together international works by queer disabled artists as part of the performance festival Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer – with all the challenges and potentials that the intersections of disability and queerness entail.
Am I a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man? – Zhuangzi The Butterfly Dream
Yui Kawaguchi translates in Mugen (Japanese: illusion, infinity) the classical elements of Japanese Nō theatre into a hypnotic interplay of dance, music and light. In a fast-paced choreography, Joy Alpuerto Ritter seems to outright fly through an installation on stage. She is fueled by Mohammad Reza Mortazavi, who single-handedly creates a sound atmosphere of orchestral quality with his instruments. Although each element exists in its own cosmos, a trance-like flow is created through ever new encounters, changing tempos and incidences of light, dissolving the boundaries between fantasy and reality, dream and wakefulness.
By playing the video, I agree to Vimeo's privacy policy and thus also to the data transfer from Vimeo to the USA.
The piece lasts about 1 hour and is without speech. In some moments the stage and the audience area are completely dark. The sound from the percussion instruments is at times very intense and loud. The piece is suitable for an audience of 12 years and older. The audience area on the grandstand is seated. There are two wheelchair spaces and one beanbag seat that can be reserved by phone or booked via the online ticket shop, if available. Admission begins 20-30 minutes prior to show time. We recommend arriving early to select a suitable seat. If you have any questions or need further information, please contact Gina Jeske at jeske@sophiensaele.com or 030 27 89 00 35.
Click HERE to find information about our performance spaces and pathways, accessible restrooms, parking, directions to the theater, a 360° video tour of the building, and more.
YUI KAWAGUCHI has been working in Berlin since 2005. In addition to her collaboration with Nico and the Navigators, she shows her own compositions of movement, space, light and sound worldwide, in which the dancing body is rediscovered. Milestones are andropolaroid (Cologne Dance Award 2010) and the multimedia production MatchAtria. In 2019, she co-choreographed Flying Pictures by Flying Steps at Hamburger Bahnhof, and in 2020 she developed Suor Angelica with Kirill Petrenko and Nicola Hümpel at the Berlin Philharmonie. In 2020 Kawaguchi is developing DisTanz with Ruben Reniers (Faust Annual Prospectus 2021). 2021 saw the world premieres of SUITE CUBIC with Julia Kursawe and Daniel Mandolini at the Konzerthaus Berlin and Somewhere, Everywhere, Nowhere with Alison Currie at the OzAsia Festival in Adelaide.
JOY ALPUERTO RITTER (born 1982 in Los Angeles/ USA) completed her training at the Palucca Dance School in Dresden in 2004. Since then she has worked as a contemporary freelance dancer with many choreographers, including Christoph Winkler, Akram Khan and Wangramirez. In 2016 she was nominated as "outstanding dancer" (modern) at the National Dance Awards UK. As a choreographer she became internationally known with her own solo work Babae, which premiered at Sophiensælen as part of the Witch Dance Project 2016, and is one of the Aerowaves artists 2020. She works as (associate) choreographer with Akram Khan, Chen Shi-Zheng, Riz Ahmed, Viviana Durante, Florence + the Machine and supports other academic institutions in Austria, Germany, Italy and Beijing.
MOHAMMAD REZA MORTAZAVI lives in Berlin as a composer and musician. He plays Tombak and Daf, two percussion instruments that have influenced him since his childhood in Isfahan, Iran. Inspired by sounds of everyday life and nature, his emotional connection to life is transformed into pulsating and polyphonic rhythms. The award-winning musician presents his music both solo, e.g. at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall or the Sydney Opera House, and in international projects with other musicians, e.g. Rundfunkchor Berlin, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen and Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, as well as producers, theaters and dancers.
CONCEPT, CHOREOGRAPHY Yui Kawaguchi BY AND WITH Joy Alpuerto Ritter (Dance), Mohammad Reza Mortazavi (Music) STAGE DESIGN Acci Baba COSTUME Sadak LIGHT, Technician Fabian Bleisch DRAMATURGE Rosi Ulrich PRODUCTION Ilja Fontaine
A production by Yui Kawaguchi | Mendora and NICO AND THE NAVIGATORS, in co-production with SOPHIENSÆLE, MA scène nationale - Pays de Montbéliard and WEHR51, funded by the City of Cologne. Media partner: taz. die tageszeitung
