Afterwords
17. APR ’24 – 20.00
— PFEFFERBERG THEATER
Two women are standing on stage. They look into each other’s eyes. They follow what they discover in each other. They let them be observed by spectators. The spectators interpret and give meaning. They attribute, speculate and evaluate. They discover the stories behind the improvised encounters and sense the stories that might follow these encounters.
In Afterwords, the spectators name the scene after it has happened. They reveal, step by step, the motive that connects the scenes. After the women’s last encounter, after their last words have been spoken, it becomes clear what this evening was about and what it meant to those who watched the two women connect.
Afterwords is an improvised performance that is not rushing and bursting with a firework of ideas from all over. It rather takes and creates time. It nurtures the space for emergence.
Concept:
Beatrix Brunschko, Randy Dixon
Performing:
Beatrix Brunschko, Kirsten Sprick
Production:
Orcas Island Project
Kirsten
Sprick
Kirsten Sprick performs, teaches and explores theater, improvisational theater and music. She is part of Hidden Shakespeare, kikikustik, Orcas Island Project and works around the globe including open-air and indoor stages, historic museums, harbor cranes, cinemas, ships, art halls, university lecture halls. She performs for the German President, the Töpfer and Körber Foundations. She acts and sings hanging from house walls, in gardens and at rooftops and under police protection in Harare.
Beatrix
Brunschko
Beatrix Brunschko is a founding member of the Theater im Bahnhof in Graz, where she works as an actress, director and improviser. She is a member of the international collective Orcas Island Project, a member of the impro ensemble Theater an der Gumpendorferstraße in Vienna, a performer and co-creator of the international project Community. In 2018, she co-founded two feminist impro collectives – My Own Private Moskow and Mary Shelley’s Mothers. As a performer and a pedagogue, she has worked at various festivals in Europe, North America and Australia. She is a professor at the Hamburg Performing Arts Academy.
Discoveries
17. APR ’24 – 20.00
— PFEFFERBERG THEATER
Our brains have to process a lot of information all the time. And since more and more information is provided in less and less time, the brain must concentrate on what seems to be most important at the moment, thus missing or censoring lots of things that are also there. Slowing down provides the opportunity to open up awareness and sharpen all our senses. Suddenly we can detect details that we have not noticed before. For an improviser, detecting these details in an improvised scene also means opportunities. Each detail can be an offer: What is the story behind the table that two people are sitting at? Which character was involved in baking the bread that these two people are eating? What kind of song would the shoes of these people sing?
A fun evening of improvised theatre where slowing down is close to discovering and details become doors to opportunities. A playful improvised show on the topic of deceleration, devised specifically for this occasion.
Concept and performing:
Thomas Chemnitz, Björn Harras, Inbal Lori
Production:
Gorilla Theater e.V.
THOMAS
CHEMNITZ
Thomas Chemnitz is an actor. After permanent engagements in Vienna, Ulm and Dessau, he has been working as a freelancer in Berlin since the early 1990s. He is a founding member of the Gorillas and has since focused his work on the art form of improvisation theater.
BJÖRN
HARRAS
Björn Harras studied acting in Leipzig and has been improvising as part of the Gorillas in Berlin’s Ratibor Theater for 15 years. In addition to theaters such as Komödie am Kudamm, his repertoire also includes regular television roles in series such as GZSZ and Beutolomäus.
DIE GORILLAS –
IMPROVISATION BERLIN
The Gorillas – Improvisation Berlin was founded in 1997 as an improvisation theater. Since then, the now 13-member ensemble has played in the Ratibortheater almost continuously and has developed numerous improvised theater formats. Other regular venues in Berlin were and are Jazzclub Schlot, Volksbühne – Green Salon, Heimathafen Neukölln, Waschhaus Potsdam and the Mehringhoftheater. In addition to performing, the Gorillas run a school for improvisational theater for professionals and amateurs and work both as an ensemble and as individual trainers and coaches for companies and organizations. International exchange has been a focus of their work for more than 20 years. Since their founding, the Gorillas have worked in a grassroots democratic manner.
Slow
18. APR ’24 – 20.00
— PFEFFERBERG THEATER
Slow has a particularly suitable metaphor:
An artist is busy carving an imposing piece of wood, while a small child stands beside him, observing his work. After a moment, the sculptor drops his tools and takes a few steps back to observe his work. The child does the same and realizes that the sculpture represents his own face! He stares at the artist, surprised, and asks, « Hey, how did you know I was in there?”
What if the story to be told is already on stage or somewhere in our bodies? What if all we have to do is reveal what is already here? Slow is a performance that creates theatrical moments out of what already exists in the space. Its unique approach plunges us into the heart of the sincerity of the moment. In this truly spontaneous theater, Marko Mayerl, Matthieu Loos and Mats Karlsson, more discoverers than inventors, make Keith Jarett’s phrase « improvisation is playing the inevitable » their own.
Concept:
Marko Mayerl, Matthieu Loos
Performing:
Marko Mayerl, Matthieu Loos, Mats Karlsson
Music:
Mats Karlsson
Light design:
Mikaël Gorce
Production:
Combats Absurdes & Inédit Théâtre
Marko
Mayerl
Marko Mayerl is an actor, improviser, author and teacher. He has been the artistic director of the company Inédit Théâtre for over 20 years and is the founder of the Amateur Theatrical Improvisation League in Strasbourg. His work with Inédit Théâtre has many aspects, for example, the non-stop week long impro shows, which aimed to question time, the relationship to the public and instant theatrical creation. Marko is also an applied theater practitioner and is passionate about using theater as a tool for social transformation. He also works at the University of Strasbourg as a theater teacher.
Matthieu
Loos
Matthieu Loos is an artist trained in Strasbourg and an Alsatian scientist deformed in dramatic art. After graduate studies in physics and a solid experience as a teenage actor, his professional life began between 2002 and 2006 through the simultaneous jobs of research engineer and actor. In both fields, the same desire to represent the world agitates him, combining a taste for uncertainty and its poetic rigor. Insubmissive poet, he is the author of the book »A clock is not time«. Actor, he sails between theater and film (Ostinato / Olivier Maurin, Amadeus Rocket / Alexandre Chetail, Inédit Théâtre / Marko Mayerl). Since 2010, he is orchestrating the collective creations of Combats Absurdes. And since 2023, he is the co-director »Le Ciel, European stage for children and youth« in Lyon.
Mats
Karlsson
Mats Karlsson is a Swedish multi-instrumentalist and composer. Afghan lute, rubab, Arabic lute, oud, guitar, his voice, various percussions and silence are among the instruments he uses to play and compose. He collaborates with the Oredan project, a participatory dance, theater and music show for children. He works as a musician for the improvisation theater in Stockholm. He leads the music group Velodrone. He composed and produced an album with the Swedish hip hop artist Blues. Mats is finally working on his second solo album. Here he lets his instruments detect musical landscapes that have not yet been explored by mixing modern rhythms with musical expressions from around the world.
Along the Book
18. APR ’24 – 20.00
— PFEFFERBERG THEATER
Over the two years of Along the Walk, a book has been made. It is an insight into the creative processes and an entry into the artistic mind, artistic strategies, intuition and other aspects that have become entangled in the seven artistic journeys. The materials include notes from the journeys, testimonies and local responses to the participatory artistic actions in the European countryside. Included are also reflections on each individual walk and findings on the general themes of the project – slowing down, deceleration, environmental awareness, social inclusion and collective work.
The book maps the creative processes of the Walks and the whole project. This event, moderated by Samo Oleami, the book’s editor, is an exploration of the creative process of the book itself.
Samo
Oleami
Samo Oleami is a critic and a dramaturg in the field of performing arts and covers a wide range of performative practices in his writing and thinking: contemporary dance, devised theater, street theater, improvisational theater, drama theater, live art and intermedia. Having experience in different roles within a creative process – director, dramaturge, performer, PR, technician – enabled him to develop a broader insight into performing practices. Through his studies, writing and art projects he developed in-depth knowledge on Slovene neo-avantgarde movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s as well as on the global context of neo-avant-garde and the emergence of contemporary performing arts practices and strategies. He currently writes for Radio Student Ljubljana.
Otherskin
19. APR ’24 – 20.00
— PFEFFERBERG THEATER
Touch is the stage.
Dance is the clothing.
Otherskin is a fashion show of such clothings on such a stage.
Touch is the stage. Otherskin is a space to experience the dance, the choreography and how to watch the dance on such a stage.
Dance is the clothing. Otherskin is a space to experience the dance as the first second skin of the body, as a protection, a mask and a shelter. Otherskin is a space researching how such a clothing shapes our physical body.
Otherskin is a fashion show of collections of clothes that are a dance on a stage that is in the touch. A pageant of touches.
In this exquisite performance developed by international artists from the field of contemporary dance we enter deceleration through touch. The audience is invited to sit, stand, lay down or even move close to the performers and watch the piece through touching. An extraordinary experience that playfully twists perspectives on performing, creation, art and life in general.
Choreography:
clothes
Fashion design, performing, co-choreography, set design, light design, sound design:
DISCOllective, Mathilde Vrignaud, Maja Dekleva Lapajne, David Kummer
Production:
idto.upri.se, DISCOproduced by World
Support:
The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, The Municipality of Ljubljana, Škuc Gallery, Association Krog, Zavod Bunker, Jambor, Along the Walk
DISCOllective
DISCOllective is a researcher of playfulness. DISCOllective researches in the roles of a dancer, performer, choreographer, clown, teacher, writer, producer, and shares the discoveries in formats like performance, installation, happening, clown act, publication, workshop, lecture. Once being stationed in Ljubljana, Slovenia, DISCOllective now practices nomadism – working, living and creating in various places around Europe.
Lecture by Gaël Brulé
20. APR ’24 – 10.30
— PFEFFERBERG THEATER
Modernity has led to a great acceleration, be it on the rhythms of individuals, societies or on the impacts on the environment. The polycrises we are facing – ecological, social, meaning – are an invitation to question this rhythm. Slowing down might be a promising way for health, well-being and sustainability. This talk will present the way walk can act as a political act.
Gaël Brulé is associate professor at Geneva School of health Sciences. Originally trained as an environmentalist (INSA France, KTH Sweden, USC United States), he has co-founded an architecture/urbanism studio, Atelier CMJN, that has won multiple international prizes and carried out research on sociology of well-being and happiness for his PhD (Erasmus University of Rotterdam, the Netherlands). He is currently teaching and carrying out research on the environmental cost of the healthcare system, the effects of pollution on health and the urban and motivational aspects of walking in Geneva (Switzerland). He has written thirty scientific articles and half a dozen books on the societal, cultural and urban conditions to pursue happiness. He enjoys waking up in the morning, walking and drinking coffee.
Lecture by Anna Saave
20. APR ’24 – 12.30
— PFEFFERBERG THEATER
Anna Saave is a postdoctoral researcher in feminist political economy with a background in environmental sciences and sustainability economics at Humboldt University, Berlin. She teaches feminist economics, political economy and ecofeminism at various universities. Having studied in Germany, Iceland and the Unites States, her research focuses on the interconnections of care, reproductive work, degrowth, artistic research and socio-ecological transformations. Her contribution at the Conference will be tackling deceleration in connection with a critique of the economy and with new conceptions of work and climate (de)coloniality.
On the Ground
20. APR ’24 – 20.00
— PFEFFERBERG THEATER
On the Ground is a fusion of a concert and a performance, which in a personal and humorous way processes the themes of speed-oriented life, precarity, feminism, work, motherhood, lack of deceleration and living in the time of late capitalism. It is a sparkling music-theatre event that records the present and states the obvious. An performance that makes room for collective questioning rather than imposing solutions.
The performers play with the various themes offered by the phrase « on the ground ». Through the metaphor of laying on the ground, they touch upon the themes of exhaustion and despair. The hopelessness in the time of brutal and escalating capitalism, climate change, corporate super-power and cuts in social benefits. On the other hand, the artists understand the ground as a firm support on which we can stand strongly and which gives us the possibility of pushing off and, consequently, of resisting. Last but not least, the ground is also the possibility of new life, the soil from which new ideas and spaces are sprouting.
Concept and performing:
Maja Dekleva Lapajne, Alenka Marinič
Costume and set design:
Katarina Zalar
Artistic support for movement:
DISCOllective
Artistic support for voice:
Irena Tomažin
Translation to English:
Jedrt Maležič
Technical directing and light design:
Špela Škulj, Borut Cajnko
Executive producer:
Urška Jež
Production:
City of Women
Co-production:
CUK Kino Šiška, DU Narobov
Support:
The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, The Municipality of Ljubljana
Alenka
Marinič
Alenka Marinič is a Ljubljana based theatre artist and one of the founders of Narobov, devoted to exploring live and living art, be it street interventions, theater events, radio interventions or interactive performances. Besides Narobov she is a co-founder of a two women theatre company Bimbo Teater and a physical theatre company Globus Hystericus. She is working as an actress and a writer on television, in film, on radio and in clown projects. Alenka has been performing and teaching improvisation, clown play and physical theatre in Slovenia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Ireland, USA, Croatia and the Netherlands.
Maja
Dekleva Lapajne
Maja Dekleva Lapajne is a director and a performer from Ljubljana. Her current projects include: Along the Walk, an international project on the topic of deceleration; Underwater, a performative concert on precarious life; 4play, a performance by Mary Shelley’s Mothers, focusing on the topic of sex through feministic standpoints; Silver Gold, a project where different dance generations meet, exchange memories and create new ones; Za crknt, an exploration of contemporary clown and cabaret formats; Life.Refabricated., a performative and writing practice with Norbert Sven Fö on topics of improvisation, revolution and love.