Come and play! Throw all your heritage into the balance.
A 40-something woman wants to have a baby and invites the audience to play the game of life with her. Based on scientific and social developments, it is about the very personal gut feeling and socially profound decisions…

After the performances »Die Natur der Kinder« (2016), »Unser Erbe« (2018) and »Good Advice« (2021), willems&kiderlen continue their artistic research on physical, social and material heritage and passing on. »Das Erbe – Schon cool, was da alles möglich ist!« is based on interviews with people affected by a heavily burdened heritage as well as with experts and scientists.

We imagine that opera does not yet exist. But we live in a time ripe for opera. And great themes are pressing everywhere and no one can listen anymore. So we go in search of an immediate expression. With the arrangement of As-Ob (and unfortunately the exclusion of opera professionals but the inclusion of a traditionally very diverse crowd of guests and professionals in many fields) we set out in January with the first premiere and the journey will continue throughout the year until there will be the great Ururoper in December. Our attempts are also entertainment and our spectators are creative co-creators. So the Ur-Opera will grow with the creative power of everyone, with every feedback, every criticism and every thought. 
You can see these experimental stations on the balcony of the Ballhaus Ost, on the first Saturday of every month. The materials, players and music are shifted slightly, but the stage design by UDK stage design students remains the same. For each small original opera, one of the students will stand in and add a special touch. 

Horwitz|Shapiro|Wagner investigate, rewrite and transform Jewish and queer rituals and create a sound space for the drag of religion between dance music and contemporary sounds. They situate traditions and histories as artistic practice and write a herstory of their own history with the political responsibility of marginalization as queer, Jewish artists.

Theater maker Heinrich Horwitz and drummer Jonathan Shapiro have been experimenting together since 2018 in changing constellations and genres at the intersections of music, performance, dance and language. After »DREAMS*« (Nürnberg 2022), »Drag & Drum« at Ballhaus Ost is their second collaborative work with performer, opera singer, songwriter and drag queen Shlomi Moto Wagner aka. Mazy Mazeltov.

A post-apocalyptic chamber play about the social center and the brutality of the normal. While everything is falling apart outside, a small piece of the good life still remains in Sector 75B. “Why,” WOMAN and MAN ask each other, “should you give things up in such hard times – especially when you’re trying so hard to be a good person in the process?”

FEELINGS comprises the stage, sound and online works, artistic research, games and feelings that Jil Dreyer and Josef Mehling have been developing with and for each other since 2017. They have previously shown work at the Staatstheater Mainz, FELD Theater Berlin and Gessnerallee Zurich, among others. »Society Intact« is their first work at Ballhaus Ost.

N O T E:
Part of the performance includes loud noises and flickering lights.
Prior to the performance, there is the option of “early boarding.” This means that those who wish can be given more time and, if necessary, assistance in entering the auditorium, finding a seat and sitting down.

Bulimia literally means “bull hunger”, so Anna Kirstine Linke throws themself and their inner bulls into the arena. Between the Pope and Madonna, as bullfighter and bull, Linke asks whether eating disorders* are protests against binary or sexist structures or how these structures produce eating disorders*?

Author, director, performer and bodyworker Anna Kirstine Linke studied Philosophie-Künste-Medien in Hildesheim, directing at the HfMT and the ZHdK & believes in the power of vulnerability. Parallel to »Stierhunger«, Linke asks in »Sex und Kartoffeln« at the Theater Magdeburg how sexualities can be decolonized.

Acoustic installative processes in holey darkness. Enigmatic figures write themselves with an archaic script through dreams whose personnel they once were. A reduced web following lush dream logic.

The Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop sees itself as co-authors of the collaborative productions. In years of collaboration with Georg Nussbaumer, new forms of experimental music theater are explored. A place that has the power to imagine other futures.

Whirlpools of packaging waste circulate in the ocean. Feminine sharks glow. Nimble hands fold oversize origami. Ropes become noodles, intestines, ghost nets. Care-Pas de Deux’ and Slow-food Porn meet at the wok campfire of a Thai megacity. In the dance performance, the visual cosmos of a glutamate-soaked fast food world is discharged, and realities of life that are difficult to digest from a Eurocentric point of view lead ritually into absurd waters.

Haus Sommer is the network label of dancer and choreographer Dasniya Sommer. In changing collaborations with other artists, she explores and expands the formal language of classical ballet under the influence of shibari, body art and contemporary performance art.

We die alone. We bury together. A participatory performance that explores the political and theatrical nature of the funeral ritual and deconstructs its settled mechanism. A ritual for which it is impossible to be fully prepared, but during this rehearsal any last wish can be fulfilled. The audience is invited to join the scripted burial ceremony, turn on their common memory of the ritual and bring in their differences of cultures and societies. To rehearse, to deconstruct, to discuss they will have the conflicted russian body of the performer whose last wish is to do no more harm and become peaceful compost. Natasha Borenko – a Siberian-born fluid theater maker, queer feminist migrant artist, who sees participatory art as a tool to deconstruct the system and rehearse the change. She develops this piece in collaboration with cross-cultural interdisciplinary artists.

In the forest of mythical creatures there is always a fight. No two people ever agree on anything. But it’s not the quarrel that’s the problem, it’s how we deal with it! In tricky situations, mouse courage, squirrel humor and peace techniques are called for. Together with the animals, the audience tries out the toolbox of conflict management.

Sebastian Mauksch & team stage participatory theater for young audiences and explore the art of adolescence. With Ballhaus Ost they created among others »Fennymore oder wie man Dackel im Salzmantel macht« (Invitations to Augenblick Mal! and Wildwechsel 2021) or »Junge Leute« (Nomination Longlist Wildwechsel 2023).

As part of the Performing Arts Festival 2023

Fernanda Farah »what draws are the eyes« (20‘)

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Andrea Neumann »ip6« (20‘) 

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Antonia Baehr »Inside the Piano« (20‘) 

Andrea Neumann has been playing the same instrument for 20 years: a self-made piano frame without a keyboard. For »Tossed Sounds« three pieces were written for the composer and musician, by performer Antonia Baehr, dancer Fernanda Farah and Andrea Neumann herself. On one condition: The instrument is absent from the stage. What remains of a musician without her instrument? What traces does it leave behind? What can be heard?

A Durational Online Festival A new festival: It’s about time! It’s about time! (Es ist Zeit!) It’s finally about time! (Es geht endlich los!) It has been about time (Die Zeit war reif) since November 2020. Back then many people were supposed to come together for four days in very small spaces for very long or very short performances. But the festival went with time and transformed its essence: It moved its program into the endless time and space of the Internet and will present itself there from September 2021. Curated by Anne Brammen, Monika Gintersdorfer, Tina Pfurr and Daniel Schrader, the Durational Online Festival It’s about time will develop, present and archive artistic works by Barbara Lenartz, Club Real, Elisabeth Tambwe, Felizitas Stilleke | Smruthi Gargi Eswar, GRUPO D3 CHOK3, Markus&Markus, ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS, vorschlag:hammer, vt corp. and many more for an unpredictably long period of time. It’s about time is a tribute to durational performances that allows art to take its time. It is a festival that will last.