Program
8 premieres under the heading COMMON SENSES shift perspectives and reflect the status quo of our social interactions. Guests from philosophy and science stimulate our thinking with impulses. You can also expect a “kiosk of unfulfilled wishes”, a floating light-space installation, bar, music, DJs and appetizers in the Discourse Kitchen.
Audience members can experience several short monologues and specials in close succession each evening – we recommend day tickets for the best festival experience.
In addition to the festival trailer, you can find Byung-Chul Han’s opening speech as a video as well as selected press reviews of the festival here.
9 Nov
10 Nov
11 Nov
12 Nov
16 Nov
17 Nov
18 Nov
19 Nov
The impulse for this live solo within an audio installation was the real-life escape of the young Cuban woman Sandra de los Santos, who had herself shipped via DHL as a ship’s propeller in a wooden crate from Havana to Miami. How does the story continue to write itself at the moment of arrival?
The moment of greeting - the “welcoming culture” - can shed light on what we take for granted. And what others don’t. In her urgent search for freedom, Sandra de los Santos sits for hours in the belly of an airplane with a bottle of water and her cell phone light. Like Jonah in the belly of the whale. Refusing her supposed fate, she flees without knowing what awaits her. How is a female presenting black body encountered? What disciplinary procedures does that body have to undergo, among other things, in transit situations? How is a person welcomed?
The performance “Say hi to me” refers to one of the many contemporary realities of migration. Author and director Viviana Medina Medina interweaves fictional texts by the character Sandra de los Santos about moments of farewell and reflections on the so-called “fatherland” (la patria) with the biblical motif of Jonah. By putting the moment of welcome on display in the theater space, a spontaneous portrait of the so-called “German welcome culture” is drawn in the reciprocal witnessing.
Viviana M. Medina, born in Havana in 1988 and raised in Thuringia, is a director and writer. She studied at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts and is engaged in intersectionality, postcolonialism, the visibility of black people, as well as Afro-East German perspectives. She performed her diploma project “Beloved” in 2022 during the art festival 48h Neukölln. A modern, post-slavery Medea story, from Black introspective. Her performance “C.V.” ran at the Academy of Arts as part of the Berlin Festival 2023. In 2022, she worked as co-director for the UFA, Disney+ and the Panthertainment production “Sam - Ein Sachse” (documentary). She is currently conceiving her first fictional series. In 2021 she founded the art group Temblor Collective together with Nadine I. Henrich. www.temblorcollective.com / @medinaviviana
With Dena Abay Director/text/stage & costume design Viviana M. Medina Assistant director Sarah Elisabeth Braun Coproduction TD Berlin in the framework of the Monologue Festival 2023 Supported by the four-year festival funding of the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion Berlin
