IN TRANSIT 11
Spectator Performing Arts Festival
15–18 June 2011
Opening: 15 June, 6 p.m.
Haus der Kulturen der Welt
Berlin
Jens Hillje, the new artistic director of the Performing Arts Festival, which has been part of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt program since 2002, the dramaturg Irina Szodruch (Berlin), and festival co-curator Tang Fu Kuen (Bangkok, Singapore), turn the Haus into an experimental field in which artists and audience can be actors and spectators at the same time.
On 15 June, IN TRANSIT 11 will be opened by three radical women. The starting point of the evening belongs to Ming Wong and his extraordinary woman, Bülent Ersoy. She is the object of his latest cultural theft as he moves between worlds and between genders. In her performance, Angélica Liddell deals with Shakespeare’s “Richard III” and examines the relationship between the body and power. After that, Ann Liv Young, dressed as a mermaid, seduces the audience.
Challenging productions of Branch Nebula, Dave St. Pierre and Daniel Kok will be on display. Meanwhile, Ivo Dimchev‘s work-in-progress project addresses works by the visual artist Franz West, awarded with a Golden Lion at Venice Biennale 2011 for his lifetime achievement.
IN TRANSIT 11 also features a performance marathon on Saturday, “Passage Through the Night”, which begins with lectures on shyness and power in the performing arts and ends well after midnight with a party; what happens in between runs the gamut of all aspects of Spectator.
One important part of the “Passage Through the Night” is the project for young people from Berlin, Eye for an Eye, who, under the leadership of the Belgian actor and director Ruud Gielens, develop their own solo performances.
The marathon includes Dick Wong from Hongkong, the pole dance teacher Eisa Jocson, an active performance by the trio Bulut/Gabia/Baroncea, mischievous Guilty pleasures with Song-Ming Ang, currently on a stipend with Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Geumhyung Jeong with Oil Pressure Vibrator, Yann Marussich with a machine that tests the nerves of the audience. For the finale, Ming Wong, together with his mother May, brings on stage Bülent Ersoy, the grande dame of Turkish song.
Artistic director Jens Hillje has been invited to put on his award-winning play “Verrücktes Blut” at the Theatertreffen 2011, one of the most important yearly events of German-language theatre. The dramaturg and curator, who grew up in Milan and Munich, has worked as co-director and dramaturg at the Baracke des Deutschen Theaters and as a member of the board of artistic directors and chief dramaturg at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, among other postings.
Tang Fu Kuen is co-curator of the festival and, at the same time, represents a link to the early beginnings of IN TRANSIT. He spent eight years working with the director Ong Keng Sen, who was co-curator of IN TRANSIT in 2002 and, at the time, the first non-European director of the festival. Tang Fu Kuen curated the Singapore pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2009, for which he and the artist Ming Wong received the Special Mention Expanding Worlds.
IN TRANSIT takes place every second year, alternating with the BERLIN DOCUMENTARY FORUM.
Full program and further information: www.hkw.de/IN_TRANSIT
Tickets can be reserved at www.hkw.de
Press Contact
Anne Maier
Press Officer
Haus der Kulturen der Welt
tel. +49 (0)30 397.87.153/196
anne.maier@hkw.de