For families with children from 5 years

In SCHRUMPF’s version of »Songs & Dances about the Weather« about glaciers and rainmaking rituals, we see an excerpt, move along with the performers, hear their stories, and tell our own stories about rain and water.

LOUDsoft is a think tank for projects that create access to the world of classical or contemporary music and musical theater for children, young people and their parents. LOUDsoft was founded in 2018 by violinist and performer Daniella Strasfogel, out of an impulse to create family events that she herself would love to go to with her family. LOUDsoft seeks to build bridges between the worlds of children’s art and adult art, bringing interactive and challenging musical experiences to the stage for young people and their families.

No sooner is the world created than a struggle for self-determination and equality begins: Lilith, the first woman of Adam, becomes the first fighter against patriarchy. Her permanent conflict of having to subordinate herself is discharged in arias and songs of contemporary music. The unconditional urge for self-determination is shown in tender but also very physical dance and fight scenes.

Anna Peschke works as a director for performance, music theater and Peking Opera in Europe and Asia. Together with the composer Christoph Enzel, she is currently also developing »Kinderlieder zum Wald – von einem Erwachsenen zu singen« and the choral piece »Officium für einen verbrannten Wald«.

In »Hotel Utopia« Christiane Mudra and ensemble invite the audience to change perspectives. Equipped with passports from different countries and data based on real biographies, the audience embarks on a Kafkaesque transit room in search of recognition in a new country and encounters the challenges of the German welcome culture. Reports on the experiences of refugees and migrants are interwoven into the evening, as are background discussions with case workers and experts. On their journey through waiting areas and offices, the participants encounter stories of flight and migration and experience individual (in)freedom depending on nationality, global political situation or ranking in the “passport index”.

After »Selfie & Ich«, an evening about mental illness, meritocracy and the terror of happiness in private apartments in Neukölln, »Hotel Utopia« is the second part of a trilogy that deals with the de facto evaluation of people in the “community of values”.

Manuel Gerst brings Kafka’s famous story to the stage as a happening from the event industry. References to bachelor parties and the reduction of aggression in groups meet action art and destruction art. Kafka’s parable is read here as a story about disability, in the field of tension between being injured and being intact. The aggression towards the deformed other in the story is turned into aggression against the object on stage. In the end, it doesn’t matter what position the audience takes – the dent remains the same. Let he who is without sin cast the first apple.

In his previous works, Manuel Gerst has repeatedly questioned and subverted existing power relations in theater in various constellations, including under the label Monster Truck. In his works he often deals with the thematic field of “disability” and economies in theater. »Die Verwandlung« is his first work at Ballhaus Ost.

There will be a post-show discussion on 11/17 following the performance (Retrospective Improvisation of Theater Scouting with Alisa Tretau).

What bodies and which dances are necessary for the present times? What does it mean to be dangerous? Or dangereuses – implying a plural feminine entity. In this choreographic work, six performers understand the risk of intimacy, gentleness and pleasure as a subversive practice and cross it with elements of self-defense, protest, training and preparation for combat.

Julia B. Laperrière and her team work in an intersectional perspective and are interested in trust, respect and love as pillars for artistic collaboration. Composed of artists navigating between many countries and cultures, the mix of languages, places, practices, people and genres —both artistic and identity related— constitute an integral part of their practice. Seeing dance through a queer feminist lense,they believe in the body as a place of change and exchange.

Bodo is 59, has no musical training and cannot read music. In 2014, he completed the album North End, on which he composed all the tracks himself and recorded them tone by tone with the help of a computer software. Based on Bodo’s music and story, Björnsson/Marx and an ensemble of professional musicians explore dilettantism as a creative force and aesthetic strategy. In a world full of experts, the aim is to take up the cudgels for the dilettante who has the courage to be creative on his or her own initiative, transcending professional and genre boundaries.

Since 2018, Thorbjörn Björnsson and Julia Marx have been forming the music theater duo Björnsson / Marx. Together they develop music theater pieces whose themes often move at the interface between the everyday and the existential, the intimate and the abstract.

What to do with the old photos of grandfathers in Nazi uniforms that you find in photo albums or framed on the sideboard? In a performative stage comic, Marie Simons and her collective take apart these photographs of soldierly masculinity, paint over them and question their impact on their own queer biography.

Marie Simons, Dennis Dieter Kopp, Nikolaus Kockel, Nora Schön and Angela Queins work at the interface of visual and performative arts. The group is united by a theoretical and practical examination of critical masculinity research and an intersectional understanding of feminism and queer identities.

»You know the Feeling« is a theater performance and a concert. Five covers of the pop song “People I’ve been sad” by Christine and the Queens, Blomen/Moré/Reiniger deal with identification, appropriation and populism as well as the social conditions of loneliness and coming together.

If you / Disappear, then I’m /Disappearing too
If you / Fall apart, then I’m / Falling behind you

Blomen/Moré/Reiniger are a theater collective and know each other from their studies at the University of Hildesheim. They are interested in the intersection of theater and reality and let autobiographical narratives meet fictional characters in their stage plays; as an intimate and at the same time public negotiation of their present.

On 10.2. after the performance: Karaoke Night with Soroa at the bar!

«Recycling of life» speculates on the eternal cycle of life and things: musically, playfully, between exhibition setting and loving chaos. Auf jeden Fall mehr bless this mess als Marie Kondō. Antje Schupp and her team recycle memories, experiences, knowledge and all our junk!

Antje Schupp is a director, performer, author, lecturer and loves interdisciplinary projects. She has worked with Ayman Nahle, a filmmaker from Beirut, on four projects and with set designer Christoph Rufer on countless others. Yanik Soland is a musician and composer. Antje and Yanik are artists in residence at the Kaserne Basel in 2023/24.

The performance is part of our guest performance series Berlin Basel Smash: from February 23 to March 9, we will be showing three pieces from the city on the Rhine at Ballhaus Ost. »Recycling of Life« by Antje Schupp | Ayman Nahle | Yanik Soland will be followed by »Court Fantasies« and »screening invisibilities« by Zino Wey.

Using imagination as a tool, performers Salma Said und Miriam Coretta Schulte shake rigid, seemingly unchangeable legal systems of asylum. They are inviting the audience to a collective listening experience:

 
 
Here we are, in 2099, and still, every person on Earth enjoys the right to freedom of movement. The gigantic fiction that used to divide people into “deserving visa” and “not deserving visa” we finally left behind us after decades of struggle. Tonight, an assembly takes place, in order to understand the recent insecurities. We want to recall how the activists of the past have been creating the future investing incredible work. We will be expecting you with love for archives and passion for fight – Yours, Salma and Miriam

The performance is part of our guest performance series Berlin Basel Smash: from February 23 to March 9, we will be showing three pieces from the city on the Rhine at Ballhaus Ost. »Recycling of Life« by Antje Schupp | Ayman Nahle | Yanik Soland will be followed by »Court Fantasies« and »screening invisibilities« by Zino Wey.