“Between Sirens” is a response to the erosion of care in a world that has increasingly become a drone of untenable violence, environmental degradation and grotesquely exploitative economic abstraction. Wade asked eight distinguished Berlin-based artists to join him in investigating the politics of care: Hovering somewhere between a TV Talk Show, Mourning Ritual and a Laboratory for the Political Imagination, the piece works with queer-feminist strategies to cope with the violent present. The ‘tools and techniques’ presented optimize one’s chance of surviving alone in a world where care and support systems are a thing of the past. However dark, the work is neither nihilistic nor optimistic, making capacities of queer feminist fictions to reorient and re-see the complicated now. In what seems to be a never ending global chorus of crisis, we offer a little pause and some space for dreaming instead about support.

Olympia Bukkakis began performing while completing a BA in Social Theory at Melbourne University in Australia and kick-started the local alternative drag scene with her party “Pandora’s Box”. She also starred in Australian queer theatre company Sisters Grimm’s “Summertime” in the garden of Eden. Since moving to Berlin in 2012, she has organised, curated and hosted various queer performance nights including “Get fucked, fancy and apocalypse tonight”. From 2015 onward, she has organised and hosted “Queens against borders”, a performance event in solidarity with trans and queer refugees. She is currently studying a Master in Solo Dance Authorship at the Inter-University Centre for Dance (HZT) in Berlin.

COOL FOR YOU is the music project of artist Vika Kirchenbauer. In decomposing harmonies as colonisers, she discusses the simultaneous consumption and exclusion of otherness, reframing bodies as heat signatures and sampling from infrared dreams. Her newest EP “MOOD MANAGEMENT” (through Creamcake) celebrated its release in early February 2017 with a performance at KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Last year’s Donaufestival featured a solo exhibition of Vika Kirchenbauer’s video work for COOL FOR YOU as well as a live performance. She has also performed at nGbK Berlin, Videonale Festival for Video and Time-Based Media and HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, amongst several other venues.

Mmakgosi Kgabi has begun an MA in Solo Dance and Authorship at the Inter-University Centre for Dance (HZT). She is an actress, trained physical theatre and improvisation performer and facilitator. She has worked with Causing a Scene, Performance of a Lifetime, and Clowns Without Borders. In 2013, she was a dance teaching artist for ArtsInsideOut (NYC), doing outreach in South Africa with teenagers, mothers and caregivers affected and infected by HIV/AIDS. In 2014, she was Artist in Residence for On Fire Berlin, creating performance and conversations around gender, tradition, homosexuality and identity. In 2015, she premiered her second solo work “Color me B-” at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse. Also in 2015, she performed her solo work “Shades of a Queen” at the Queer New York International Arts Festival. Her work often interrogates the premise of identity and nationalism, coming back to the themes of Queer identity, Black Female Body Politics, and Migration.

Maika Knoblich worked as an assistant to various directors at Maxim Gorki Theatre Berlin and did her B.A. at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Gießen, where she established a long-lasting collaboration with fellow student Hendrik Quast. In 2010, she joined the Master’s program DasArts in Amsterdam, receiving a directors scholarship from the DAAD. Furthermore, Maika works as a light designer and dramaturge for various choreographers and directors. quastknoblich.de

Lydia Sonderegger studied costume design at the Berlin University of arts and pattern design at Polimoda in Florence. As a costume designer in the field of contemporary dance she has been working with Kat Válastur, Virgilio Sieni, Laurent Chétouane, Lea Moro, Josep Caballero García and others. In Italy, she designed the costumes for the theatre company Teatro Sotterraneo and worked with the fashion label Boboutic. Subjects that occur recurrently in her research, problems and design conceptions are the transformability of the human body, individuality and uniformity and the coaction of zeitgeist and its respective representation of the human body. Since 2017, she teaches at the École de mode Atelier Chardon Savard in Berlin.

Jeremy Wade is a performer, performance maker, curator and teacher. His recent works “Together Forever”, “Death Asshole Rave Video” and “DrawnOnward” explore queer theory, failure, the death of man, zombie subjectivity, strange modes of being and affective alliances to undermine the social codes that define and oppress our bodies. In 2017 he curated “Take Care,” a symposium in the frame of the No Limits-Festival Berlin on the relational ethics that disability culture demands and will direct a three-part performance project addressing care as a political strategy comprised of: “The Battlefield Nurse” (a drag lecture performance that investigates the work of fellow nurses on the battlefield), the “Future Clinic for Critical Care” (a world-making forum dedicated to art, activism and social work), and “Between Sirens”, a new trio processing supportive propaganda for toughened times. jeremywade.de

Julian Weber is a choreographer/dancer and visual artist. He studied at HBK Brunswick, Academy of Arts Vienna, HZT Berlin and the Theaterschool in Amsterdam. He works intensively on spaces of interaction involving body, material and movement. He collaborates with artists such as Meg Stuart, Boris Charmatz and Tino Sehgal and creates his own work at the intersection of visual and performance art. With his work “the tourist”, he was awarded the Berlin Art Prize 2015. julianweber.berta.me

Allison Wiltshire is a director, dramaturg and writer from Melbourne, Australia. Her work is inspired by sci-fi, noise and electronic music, body horror, feminism, poetry, philosophy and mythology. Allison founded the live art group Spill Collective in 2007, producing multimedia and hybrid-performance events in abandoned buildings, public spaces and music festivals throughout Melbourne, including Dark Matter (Federation Square), Solipsis (45downstairs) and Injest (Cream Fields Music Festival). In 2009, Allison co‐founded feminist theatre collective I’m Trying To Kiss You, directing and writing the critical acclaimed works “I Know There’s A Lot Of Noise Outside” (NIDA, Melbourne Fringe Festival) and “Madonna Arms (Next Wave Festival and Arts House)”. allisonwiltshire.com

[Source: play bill]

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