With over 120 drama, dance, and performance events taking place at three locations in the city, the 100° Berlin Festival is an invitation to a four-day theatre marathon. Running from 26 February to 1 March, this year’s programme will be the festival’s last. For 12 years, HAU Hebbel am Ufer and SOPHIENSÆLE, joined sometimes by the Theaterdiscounter, and last year for the first time by the Ballhaus Ost, have showcased the city’s wide spectrum of independent theatre and performance artists. But recent years have seen enormous changes and developments, both in Berlin as a city and in the independent performance scene itself. It’s time to recognise and reflect these changes. From spring 2016, in collaboration with LAFT (the Berlin regionalassociation for independent visual arts), and in dialogue with various venues, artists, and the Berlin Senate department for culture and the economy, we will be establishing a new format for the festival, which will embrace this changing cultural environment.
But first we’ll be gathering for one last time at the 100° Berlin Festival to celebrate the diversity of the independent performance scene. For a second year, Ballhaus Ost is joining HAU Hebbel am Ufer and SOPHIENSÆLE to host the festival. All three venues are opening their stages, foyers, cloakrooms, cellars, and courtyards for performances every hour. At HAU Hebbel am Ufer, an imaginary visit to a Disney theme park is the excuse for the Ruby Thomas Collective to take a trip right across Europe.
A place of fantasy and make-believe is an interactive performance which takes a playful look at our ideas about Europe, and especially at how today’s drawing of boundaries turns people into outsiders.
The group Errorszenarien exposes a plant to life-threatening conditions and turns its fate into an audible experience for the audience. Their project Follow the plant dying, translates this imaginary ‘vegetable death’ into asymphonic composition.
Don’t kill this messenger! combines storytelling, a news show, a dance performance, and a concert in a single production. Gregor Glogowski / Johanes van Bebber / Maria Tsitroudi are messengers who deliver recorded media reports and develop them into a musical and choreographic composition.
In Meet me as a stranger, contemporary dance meets breakdance. Bringing together their different movement techniques, Andriana Seecker and Axel “Micky” Schiffler try to find a shared artistic language.
Szpecht / Adamczak are also looking for a shared language in their performance entitled Dolphin_who_loved_me. Drawing on scientific research into the ability of dolphins to speak, they explore, with the aid of sound recordings, the possibility of intimate relationships between humans and dolphins.
Divocean is a Body Concert; a physical immersion in music. Sweating, singing, and using musical mantras, António Onio creates a profound dimension of sensory perception.
In his one-man show, Extended, Michael Shapira uses objects, language and music to explore personal and collective narratives and looks at how performers and audience become co-creators.
Dancer Paula Rosolen also turns to themes of memory and authorship. In Die Farce der Suche – Ein Solo von und über Renate Schottelius (2010) (The farce of the quest– a solo by and about Renate Schottelius), she investigates how a theatrical representation can bring archive documents to life in the minds of an audience.
In this years’ programme, under the title ‘100° Spirit’, we also have a selection of items specially designed to offer the public a restorative experience. Theatre-goers whose heads are spinning from the festival marathon can take time out by visiting these installations and individual shows – all marked in the programme with a “yin-yang” symbol. One example is the performative installation **better triggers** by the ASMR yourself Agency. The group works with so-called Live-ASMR-Triggers, exciting our senses with various stimuli.
There are also video works and installations to be seen, the midnight speakers Matthias Dell, Sebastian Matthias, Anna Fries, Sandra Umathum, Nadine Vollmer, Stefan Kaegi, Damian Rebgetz and Anna Mülter comment on the performances they have watched and an expert jury picks the winners which can be seen again as part ofthe Best of 100° at HAU Hebbel am Ufer on 30 and 31 March. Reporters from Berlin University of the Arts will be following the Festival in their Blog 100Wort, with criticism, backstage reportage, interviews, and essays.
And of course, at the end of every Festival day there will be partying till the early hours. At the 100° Opening Party, <hundhaar> will be giving an electro concert, with the DJ team from HEY Musikblog manning the turntables afterwards. On Friday, the group Ravechannel invites you to take to the dance floor with them and on Saturday, DJ Paul Dunca is the host at a Post-Trash-Gypsy-Queer-Euphoria-Party. On Sunday, Dunca returns to compere the Festival’s grand finale – theprize-giving. And finally, a concert by andcompany&Co. and an invitation by DJ Sascha Sulimma and Tatiana Saphir aka DJ Obstsalat to join them once more on the dance floor.