An imperfect evening of theatre becomes a mirror of inner upheaval: Marianne dreams of a glamorous debut as a female icon in the spotlight — with dance, song and breathtaking costumes. But the audience arrives too early, meeting Marianne not in the radiance of perfection, but in vulnerability and uncertainty. Despite the adverse circumstances, Marianne holds fast to her dream. In doing so, the unfinished becomes a central element: it opens up a space in which desires, struggles and the complex entanglements of queer identity are negotiated. Paul Marianne Furtwängler, born in 1999 in Munich, completed a Master’s in Expanded Theatre at the HKB Bern in 2025. Their work focuses on the intersection of acting, movement and queer forms of storytelling. Before the show on 29.9., the curators will kick off the festival with a short speech. A conversation with the artist will take place after the show. The opening evening will then continue with a few surprises, including a performance by Mohamad Moe Sabbah and music.»Mariannes großes Debüt« is part of Le Lampenfieber 2026 festival »Are We A Thing?«.

Elise and Sarah, both born in the 90s, search, rummage through and falsify their respective childhoods, unravelling their threads to create their own mythology of love. Armed with curiosity and a touch of madness, they embark on an intrepid journey inward. Their writing companions are Carmen Maria Machado and her reflections on enmeshed relationships and violence within same-gender couples, Yann Andréa and his writings on his all-consuming love for Marguerite Duras, and Dorothy Allison and her thinking on the making of desire. They weave a complex fabric of autofiction and a grand conscious dream stretching from Lyon to Grenoble, from Forks to Transylvania. Their stories intertwine into parallel chronologies, lives they would have liked to live and others they wish to undo. Always in the background, one question: how can they be sure to end up together on the same beach? The Compagnie troisbatailles was founded in 2022 by Sarah Delaby-Rochette in the Drôme and has been affiliated with the Comédie de Valence for three years since 2024. It works on contemporary texts and fictional narratives set in rural areas and peri-urban transition zones, in close collaboration with contemporary writers. Its productions include Dany coiffure (2021, a solo piece with Gaïa Oliarj-Inés), Gloria Gloria by Marcos Caramés-Blanco (2023, winner of the Prix Incandescences and the Prix Prémisses 2022), Buster, my love with Élise Martin (2024, performed at the Théâtre de l’Athénée Louis Jouvet, amongst others), and A sec by Marcos Caramés-Blanco (2025, Comédie de Valence). A conversation with the artists will take place after the show on 30.9.»Buster, my love« is part of Le Lampenfieber 2026 Festivals »Are We A Thing?«.

Mille and Alissia have a lot in common: lesbianism, Dads who live in former Communist-turned-Capitalist-Dictatorship countries thousands of kilometres away, an obsession for raw red peppers. In this Sino-Russian version of Les Misérables meets Never Have I Ever, they invite you to a vibrant, biting and sincere celebration of daddy issues, queer friendships, Communist history… and multilingual forgiveness. Expect some physical theatre, singing rituals, Russian pickles, Chinese tea, and dramatic PowerPoints, as their explore their relationships with each other, their Dads, and politics. Ready for the ride? Directed by Mille Zhong and Alissia Pervozvanski-Dangles, the goals of the company 88 mètres/seconde are to create bold, ambitious, lesbian, and decolonial work, blending physical theatre and experimental performance to advocate for radical representation, healing, and political change. After the show on 1.10., a surprise will be waiting for you.After the show on 2.10., an artist talk will take place. That week, the group 88 mètres/seconde will also host the lab »Famili(es) – a writing workshop«.Both »Le Grand soir« and »Famili(es) – a writing workshop« are part of Le Lampenfieber 2026 festival »Are We A Thing?«.

Too Black for the theater world, too white for my mother, I chose the stage as an escape. »Report on My Past Life as a Black Woman« is a hybrid one-woman show blending dance, DJing, and storytelling. Behind the turntables, I deconstruct Afro-electronic sounds, from Amapiano to Gqom, to tell the story of a dual existence and explore the contradictions that run through it. Massandje Sanogo is a performance artist, writer, and director. Her work lies at the intersection of the body, sound, and image, drawing on bodily memory and improvisation. Drawing on intimate narratives tied to Black and Afro-descendant identities, she creates spaces of resonance between individual experiences and shared narratives.  After the show on 4.10., Marilyn Nova White will perform »You are hired #3«, a short solo drag-inspired show about work, identity and empowerment in late capitalism.On 4.10., Massandje Sanogo will also host the voice lab »Oxygène’s Workshop«. Both »Rapport sur ma vie antérieure de femme noire« and »Oxygène’s Workshop« are part of Le Lampenfieber 2026 festival »Are We A Thing?«.

Dear Lovers of Light Entertainment!We offer what You have been looking for on the Internet!»Best Compilation Ever« lives up to its name: It’s a Kiss Kiss Kiss Parade—a dazzling Succession of Sensations! What unfolds is a Living Spectacle of Approach and Retreat: fluid, unruly and deliciously unresolved.A magical show of intimate curiosities, where desire refuses to settle, and no expectation is set.. »Best Compilation Ever« struggles with the logic of the compilation — a format familiar from YouTube, TikTok or pornography, where loosely linked climaxes form a genre. The category is KISSING. Though kissing itself has no climax, it is often staged as a contractual conclusion: the proverbial »happy ending«, a consumable image. Yet in the act itself, eyes close and attention shifts away from the visual. Through improvisation and repetition, the performers turn the climax into an ongoing, expansive encounter. Between image and embodied process, they seek a performative language of desire that destabilizes capitalist logics of commodification and reclaims repetition as a site of resistance. »Best Compilation Ever« is a performance by Livi Scheucher, created in collaboration with actor Thea Ehre and sound artist Kirikou Gueye. After the performance on 3.10., there will be a performance by Mohamad Moe Sabbah.After the performance on 4.10., there will be an audience discussion.On both evenings, we’ll round off the night with music. Stay a little longer for a drink and a dance with us! »Best Compilation Ever« is part of Le Lampenfieber 2026 festival »Are We A Thing?«.

A performative campfire installation for ages 10+ Around the campfire, the wood crackles. The air smells of smoke, forest, sweetness, and char. Stories are told, guesses are made, imaginations run wild, and tales are passed on. But what is already in the air—and what only comes into being through retelling?Together, we light an artistic campfire and cook a rumour soup: logs are added to the fire, stick bread and foil-wrapped potatoes drift through the smoke, and scents spread—warm, familiar, and full of anticipation. Stories begin to circulate: small observations, claims, rumours. Some change along the way, others stick.Amid smoke, sound, and flickering light, a collective rumour takes shape—sentence by sentence, scent by scent. After all, we love passing stories on. But judgments form quickly. What does it take for whispers and murmurs to suddenly become accepted as reality? How quickly can a rumour turn into something that can no longer be undone?A fireside game about social dynamics, hearsay, exclusion, and community. Sebastian Mauksch & Team create theatre as a space for shared experience and discovery for children and young people. Combining performance, text, visual arts, sound, and technology, they explore social questions together with their audiences, inviting them to test their own perspectives and ways of acting.

How much are you willing to give for love? »True Romance« takes the audience deep into the heart of pig butchering — the most brutal form of digital romance scam. It is a billion-dollar business built on perfectly engineered emotional scripts: through endless messages, a real and beautiful relationship is sold to you, the damn best relationship you will ever have! And of course, that comes at a price. Until your bank account is empty. Until everything you have is gone.Up to 15 audience members per performance experience the work of three characters inside a scam center. The immersive performance unfolds live in an office setting, somewhere between karaoke to Lana Del Rey’s »Video Games« and beer pong, while also taking place through smartphones handed out at the beginning. Using an app specially developed for the performance, parts of the story are delivered directly to the audience’s devices through personal chats and videos.»True Romance« — a play about the promise of love in the digital age. A play like a message from the person you love. A play just for you. Stefan Mießeler is an author and director. He creates performances and theatrical works that combine spoken theater with immersive settings and trash aesthetics.

TICKETS The drag theater play LINEAGE explores queer heritage, a lineage that defies the norms of logic and blood, connecting individuals through their experiences. Corazón, AzulySuave, Bala BimBamBum, Na Fallera Fatal and Papi Pistola embark on an emotional journey in which they explore the lives of various icons and figures who form the backbone of LGBT+ culture(s). Over the course of the play’s hour and a half, Corazón takes the audience, through musical and visual numbers, to different milestones that make up a constellation of queer relationships. Starting with the ghostly presence of her grandmother, she traverses a trail of icons such as Rampova, Almodóvar and Grace Jones, discussing topics of LGBT+ exile, subversion in the nightlife, folklore and the influence of religion as culture. Corazón is a Valencian drag artist and stage designer based in Berlin, bringing together an ensemble of drag artists from the plurality of the Spanish drag scene. From punk to glamour, and always subversive, the artists from Valencia, Barcelona, Cuenca and Madrid show the reality of the city they inhabit.

The first chance encounter: Beatriz arrives at Friedrichstraße Station in East Germany; Laura, who is pregnant, throws up. The second: Laura sees Beatriz’s circus performance and writes a feminist critique. In the High Middle Ages of the 12th century, disillusioned by the patriarchal structures of her time, the professional minstrel Beatriz de Dia asks Persephone to put her into an 810-year-long slumber. She awakens in 1968, just as her castle in southern France is about to be demolished to make way for a highway and the student protests are raging in Paris. Beatriz had hoped to land in an era of social progress and the realization of third-wave feminism—she rejoiced too soon. From a France that fails to keep its revolutionary promises, Beatriz flies to the GDR on the back of the beautiful Melusine. There she meets Laura Salman, a philology graduate and S-Bahn train conductor, who becomes the playmate Beatriz has longed for…Inspired by the writer Irmtraud Morgner, SANCHA LAURA brings together two dissimilar women from seemingly long-gone eras—the Middle Ages and the GDR—who grapple with the unfulfilled promise of an emancipatory future and set off together on a poetic and wild Aventüre. The Musiktheaterkollektiv Hauen und Stechen develops its productions in basements and on opera stages and has been creating radically accessible music theater since 2012. Its work blends prominent and obscure music from various genres with influences from theater, opera, film, philosophy, visual arts, and performance.www.hauen-und-stechen.com

»It is, after all, an unshakable conviction that love is, remains, and will always be terrene—for death cannot kiss.«– Liddy Bacroff The interdisciplinary performance begins by tracing the footsteps of the trans* artist and sex worker Liddy Bacroff, who was murdered under the National Socialist regime. The Hamburg-based choreographer René*e Reith follows those ghosts that take possession of a person, those one leaves behind oneself, and those that return restlessly because something has remained unfinished. »Dances of Almost Forgotten Ghosts« opens a space for the audience in which their own bodies and movements become carriers of memory and imagination. In an interactive performance, René*e Reith and her team combine contemporary dance with biographical performance. René*e Reith is pursuing a practice-based artistic PhD at the MUK (Music and Arts Private University of the City of Vienna), focusing on the staging of transness in contemporary dance and performance. On stage are Heinrich Horwitz, Géraldine Schabraque, Tubi Malcharzik, and Alexander Hahne, whose distinct performative approaches combine dance, singing, and performance into a multilayered space of remembrance. All of them are experts in their artistic fields and, through their own trans perspectives, have for several years been engaged in activism, education, and performance aimed at critically addressing patriarchal and hegemonic structures while simultaneously strengthening the visibility and rights of trans people.