Ballhaus Ost Launches ‘Queer Planet Future’

by Olivia Ladanyi // June 6, 2023

Prenzlauer Berg performance venue Ballhaus Ost is launching its June program titled ‘Queer Planet Future.’ The bill of seven events kicks off on June 9th with ‘Holobiontinnen,’ in which two performers “make contact with their microbial co-world.” The transdisciplinary team, comprising Eva Hintermaier and Simon Kalus, are interested in humans’ intertwining relationship with bacteria. In ‘Holobiontinnen,’ humans and bacteria perform together and communicate on stage, involving the audience in the network of microbes, humans and machines.

Eva Hintermaier & Simon Kalus: ‘Holobiontinnen’ // Photo by Johanna Baschke

‘Flipper’ is a 24-hour happening that traces dolphins’ sense of time. The event, which will take over the entire theatre space, explores the highly developed emotional system of dolphins through “queer healing,” gabba and live tattooing. The audience can join for the whole 24 hours, for a self-selected period of time or can choose to go and come back. Sleeping facilities are available and a bar is open all day.

Heinrich Horwitz, Rosa Wernecke, Magdalena Emmerig, Annett Hardegen: ‘Flipper’ // Photo by Rosa Wernecke x DALL•E, courtesy of the artist

Interactive site-specific radio show ‘Beton. Wüste. Zukunft.’ will record the sounds of Floating—the disused rain catchment basin of Tempelhof Airport—inviting the audience to investigate their own feelings and actions around the climate crisis. Queer performance collective Once We Were Islands will present ‘Big Bangs & Black Holes,’ a digital double-bill shown together for the first time. Initially created as stage works and transformed into films, ‘Dogs of Love’ and ‘We Come With Nothing’ explore queer relationships, intimacy, connection and estrangement.

PINSKER+BERNHARDT: ‘Dating A Forest’ // Courtesy the artist and Ballhaus Ost

In ‘Dating A Forest,’ visitors are invited to “book a dating slot” to make new connections with the forest, exploring the forest’s place and meaning in German culture, as well as the individual’s relationship with it. While ‘Dating A Forest’ makes nature and the forest the protagonist, ‘Sentimental Bits – Encountering Perception’ examines technologized modes of perception and the body’s relationship with technology. The performance—or live experiment—will transform data into living feedback loops, inviting the audience to drift through sensory layers to discover new notions of body and self.

Gloria Höckner: ‘Sentimental Bits – Encountering Perception’ // Photo by Jonas Fischer, courtesy of the artist

The last event on the schedule, ‘Atom Eier Uhr,’ will see Club Real build the prototype of a repository container for the inner courtyard of Ballhaus Ost. The egg-shaped warning sign will contain a piece of radiant uranium rock for 1,000,000 years. The work investigates how society digests and copes with the knowledge that we must deal with the disposal of radioactive waste from recently-closed nuclear power plants for the next million years.

Founded in 2006 and housed in a former celebration and meeting hall, Ballhaus Ost is an experimental stage for diverse forms of contemporary theatre. The space invites the audience to discover new ways of dealing with the realities of life today, searching for alternatives to normative structures through its socially critical program.