International Performance-Festival
The festival Making Life in the Ruins opens at Sophiensæle on May 15. The international performance festival will present a total of ten productions, including six German premieres. The first week of the festival will feature productions by Tiran Willemse, Basel Zaraa and Paula Almirón.
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Veranstaltungsplakat
Performance
Making Life in the Ruins brings together contemporary artistic practices from different parts of the world that move within an ambivalent tension – between the deep urge to dismantle old certainties, and our grief over what has been violently taken.
The festival‘s works offer ways of engaging with futures that are no longer possible, and with the pasts that linger – not as burdens, but as raw materials for renewal. They weave memory with imagination to create speculative narratives, archaeologies, and alternative rituals.
In Untitled (Nostalgia, Act 3) from 15.05., Tiran Willemse invokes his own multiple histories of dance through a kaleidoscope of the 19th century ballet classic Giselle, the Kuduro from Angola, and the Nigerian genre Alanta.
From May 16, the intimate and interactive installation Dear Laila will bring a now destroyed place to life. In his work, Basel Zaraa explores how war and exile are experienced through the everyday, the domestic, and the public space.
The Brussels-based Argentinian choreographer Paula Almirón will be bringing a work to Berlin for the first time from May 16. Set in the salty ruins of a vanished river, The River and The Devil invokes the devil as the river’s guardian and embarks on a search for the remnants of fragmented stories, mythological figures and spirits.
A Workshop on Water justice on May 18 with Paula Almirón and Evelyn Linde will focus on activist and artistic as well as international and local perspectives: What does water justice mean? What is the state of water in Berlin and Brandenburg? And during a Historic house tour on May 17, Sophiensæle will invite visitors to discover the remains of the past in the building, to peel back the various historical layers and to understand the ruins as a breeding ground for new narratives and a critical approach to the past.
What if ruins aren’t just sites of collapse, but of departure? What if, among many endings, there is also a beginning?
Programme:
Making Life in the Ruins – Sophiensæle | Freies Theater in Berlin
