The new show by Constanza Macras continues a collaboration between Dorkypark and many of the young Southafrican cast members of her successful production Hillbrowfication.

In THE VISITORS, they dive into the fascinating world of slasher movies (as 1977´s Halloween), a sub-genre of horror cinema in which teenagers are threatened and killed in numbers. While their parents and other adult figures are typically absent or completely useless, time and again the young ones must deal with the monsters on their own. Re-elaborating on the codes and aesthetics of the genre in the specific context of post-apartheid South Africa, the show touches on themes such as the state orchestrated destruction of family structures during apartheid times, and the persistence of a colonial legacy of bureaucracy and corruption that still disrupts daily life. But if the relentless return of the past is a characteristic trait of slasher cinema, so is the youthful protagonists search for tangent narratives out of it as they fiercely fight the monsters away.

Duration: approx. 90 min.

A production by Constanza Macras | Dorkypark, in coproduction with Ruhrtriennale, Kampnagel and The Windybrow Arts Centre und Market Theatre. With the support of the International Coproduction Fund of the Goethe Institut and the NATIONALES PERFORMANCE NETZ International Guest Performance Fund for Dance, which is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

In I Feel You, a group of people search for access to complex feelings such as empathy and excitement through the infinite possibilities of today’s entertainment media. Starting from the nature of digital space and its effects on interpersonal interaction, the choreography is created with the help of neurophysiological findings. It is about the phenomenon that the perception of physical movements, caused by certain emotions of the moving person, generate the same emotions in the observer. This means that we actually feel with the other person-in the truest sense of the word, we can “empathise” with them.

The choreography becomes a search for what activates our brain in our body as a result of having such mirror reactions. Empathy is also treated musically by incorporating genres of classical and pop music, which paradigmatically serve as aesthetically exaggerated empathy catalysts. What is it about them that touches people so strongly, and how is it that massive emotional responses can be generated by mere melodic and rhythmic formulas that linger in our ears and cause an entire opera house or stadium to be flooded with a collective flow of tears?

I Feel You is a creation by and with the five permanent dancers of the company DorkyPark (and a guest dancer) and the collaborative work of musician Santiago Blaum, whose compositions are performed live by the performers. The performance is conceived for non-theatrical spaces as well as conventional stages.

Duration: 80 minutes

In DRAMA, a group of people work hard to sound out the opportunities and limits of the stage space in a post-pandemic time, when users have become the content of social media.

On the real stage of the theatre, it is the well-known plays that work best with audiences. Shakespeare? Sophocles? Again? In suits? The performers explore a variety of genres to merge them into an imitation of the stage genre “La Revista Argentina”, a mixture of cabaret and French glamour revue, catchy Spanish tunes, Italian humour, lots of feathers, big music show and popular comedians. “La Revista Argentina” evolved at the time of the Weimar Republic, when Buster Keaton released the film The Haunted House, in which criminals and lousy actors from a mediocre Faust production clash.

The figures in DRAMA nurture the anthropological desire to cut up popular culture to discover the arc of suspense between “high” and “low” art, and the untiring energy of the glamour dancers of the Argentinian revue of the 1920s. They constantly change the settings: from Shakespeare to the soap operas of our time, to musicals like Fame and past revues. They create a cosmos of great emotions, illusions and artificiality. The past revue: human dramas in an artificial world where no pain is shown, no effort. The Vedettes put on their mechanical smiles, the curtain opened and they went on stage. Robert Lippok’s musical score adds to this atmosphere, contrasting the musical referencing of pop songs.

The performers compete for the worn-out attention span of audiences in the era of clickbait. But how can you compete with the never-ending spectacle of politics and news, fake or true? Drama and tragedy happen everywhere, not just on stage. Joseph Campbell’s reconciliation with his father is the root and rerun of endless heroic stories of the patriarchal kind, but is a hero’s journey perhaps just a reflection of some male director who has a father complex?

Premiere on 19 January 2023 at Volksbühne Berlin (DE).

In 2013, Constanza Macras/DorkyPark created the piece Forest: The Nature of Crisis, a piece that took as point of departure the romantic associations to the forest, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, the economic bubbles and economies in crisis. Romanticism is the cult of the individual, the inner spark of divinity that links one human being to another and all human beings to the larger truth. For the Romantic, Nature was, indeed, a constant companion and teacher. She became the stage on which the human drama was played, the context in which man came to understand his place in the universe. Throughout all of Romantic literature, music, and art, Nature is a dynamic presence, a character who speaks in a language of symbols at once mysterious and anthropomorphic. The piece was performed in Müggelwald Berlin as a 4-hour long performative walk trough different notions of space. 

Stages of Crisis was to be a stage version of the materials developed in the forest. The piece was to carry the converted fairy tales and the reminiscence of nature to another place: a supermarket where products present themselves as the further possible vortex to nature. 

The creative process started in 2019, was to be premiered in may 2020 at HAU Hebbel am Ufer and had to be postponed to may 2021. The context of the pandemic hang over the long ago chosen tittle of the work.  

Today, as the crisis deepens economically and ecologically, as humanity moves forward in denial of the harmful effects of digitalisation in the environment and the place of the stage is largely in danger, the reality of theatre is put into a big question mark. The hierarchies of the stage, the fight about which is a “better” or “bigger” stage becomes obsolet when there are only empty theatres; Where are the question about the audience  numbers, who has a bigger platform, and where the hell is the Theatre Meeting?  

The piece transits between over consumption and the global initatives and reactions born in the internet and fed by fear horror vacui and cookbooks in lockdown. Individualism in crisis but without searching to copy nature to find collectivism, a new way that fails because solidarity as such hasn’t established and predatory forms prevail without a clear goal or pray .  

“What happens when the best biologies of the twenty-first century cannot do their job with bounded individuals plus contexts, when organisms plus environments, or genes plus whatever they need, no longer sustain the overflowing richness of biological knowledges, if they ever did? What happens when organisms plus environments can hardly be remembered for the same reasons that even Western indebted people can no longer figure themselves as individuals and societies of individuals in human-only histories? Surely such a transformative time on earth must not be named the Anthropocene!”  (Haraway, Donna J., Staying with the Trouble). 

Duration: 90 min.

A production by Constanza Macras | DorkyPark in coproduction with HAU Hebbel am Ufer. Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds. 

The West develops fictional worlds that deal with cultural imperialism, and questions the means of constructing visual landscapes, which have shaped the socio-economic relationships between the global south, the East and the West to this day. Exoticism emerges as a projection of Western wishful thinking and as an aesthetic exploitation of the foreign in the empire of Western mass cultures. The American socialization of Latin America was at its peak between the 1970s and the 1980s. Film and television served as powerful propaganda instruments to project a certain world view directed against the communist East: from Wonder Woman to today’s Homeland, these series were suitable for the dissemination of American strategies and ideologies. Besides, working through the cracks of lesser good was a way to show us that if something was falling in the category of bad by the good ones, it was always for a greater good.

The West draws a performative study of Western strategies of occupation, reflects didactic methods of cultural imperialism, and takes a look at Western societies as the dream factory of artificial authenticity.

Duration: 2 hours, 10 min./ one intermission

A production by Constanza Macras | DorkyPark in coproduction with Volksbühne Berlin. Constanza Macras | DorkyPark is supported by Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa.

The changes in the center of Berlin since the fall of the Wall are well known: abandonded buildings were occupied and used for interventions, the city turned into a melting pot for creative and partying people. However, this process of gentrification seems to be accompanied by an increasingly cultural trivialization which seems to suit the taste of a global, well-situated middle class. DER PALAST addresses this topic by focussing on the space´s architecture and by giving more visibility to past, present and future of the city and its inhabitants. Point of departure are the portraits of the british photographer Tom Hunter, whose work evolves around social issues and the restaging in the style of the Old Masters. In DER PALAST, these pictures – a series of photographs taken in Berlin about neighborhoods that are changing, shops that are closing, people who are being evicted – create new narratives between fiction and reality. As a counterpart to the architecture stands the worldwide existing format of reality TV shows. Here, not only the jurors are reproduced continuously, but also the set design and the participants. In this global cultural context, we do not need to understand the language to know exactly what is going on and which characters are being represented. In the frame of the reality show, special guests will be invited. The soundtrack is by Robert Lippok and a live band.

Duration: aprox. 100 min.

A production by Constanza Macras | DorkyPark in coproduction with Volksbühne Berlin. Constanza Macras | DorkyPark is supported by Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa.

Chatsworth is the name of one of the Indian townships in Durban where Indian immigrants were relocated during apartheid. In Chatsworth, Constanza Macras is interested in showing the diverse ways that the Indian diaspora has found to relate to the intersections of multiculturalism, the global and the local. Traditional Indian dance and drama entangle with contemporary forms and subject matter. Musicals are the common ground on which cultural appropriation is not condemned but seemingly necessary. Through the lens of Bollywood, the performers immerse in a universe of assimilation, transformation and resilience: the diasporic self.

Duration: 110 min.

A production by Constanza Macras | Dorkypark in coproduction with Tanz im August, HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin) and Soweto Theatre (Johannesburg).  Funded by the TURN Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation and by the State of Berlin – Senate Department for Culture and Europe.

Duration: 90 min.

A production by CONSTANZA MACRAS | Dorkypark and the Outreach Foundation’s Hillbrow Theatre Project. In coproduction with the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin and with the support of Goethe-Institut. Funded by the TURN Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

The Pose deepens the research on the subject of memory, images and representation in relation to history and architecture on a more intimate level, taking an extended diachronic perspective and investigating the self-portraying of yesterday and today – from classical portraiture through historical photo-documents to digital selfies. How do the iconographic narrative of self-presentation change through the abundance of careless images? Are selfies signs of a serious narcissistic object relationship? Are we dealing here with a regression back to the “mirror stage”, as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan described it observing small children, who discover their own reflection for the first time. For its Berlin Premiere, Constanza Macras created a site-specific parcours that leaves the conventional theater stage and leads the audience between the intimate spaces and monument stage pictures of the historical architecture of the Academy of Arts at Hanseatenweg. In this peripatetic walk through the parallel performances, in which walking and thinking are reconciled, the spectators experience the collective memories of the architectural space of Werner Düttmann.

Following this structure, the work can be adapted to diverse unconventional spaces and escalated according to the different formats and sizes.

Duration: 180 min.

A production by CONSTANZA MACRAS | Dorkypark in collaboration with Robert Lippok. The production is supported from the funds of the HKF – Hauptstadtkulturfonds. In cooperation with Akademie der Künste Berlin.

In The Past, Constanza Macras explores the art of memory, or ars memoriae, in which memories are particularly strongly associated with physical locations, rooms and architecture.  Created with the collaboration of Swiss-Italian music composer Oscar Bianchi, who composed the music, the starting point for this piece was the city as a concrete geographical location, as an anchor for memory, a mental picture and a cast of mind. What happens with our memories, what happens to those who are remembering when these physical places are destroyed? The actions of the performers on stage refer to the ancient techniques of ars memoriae, whereby in order to recall the thing to be remembered, we first have to find and organize our impressions. At the heart of this mnemonic technique is spatial orientation. How do we use rooms and places to remember? The Past explores architectonic places as narrative instruments of our history – in the rewriting of history, for overcoming the wounds of the past, and for understanding contemporary events (personal and global) as part of a constant cycle that we experience as the passing of time.

Duration: 105 min.

A production by CONSTANZA MACRAS | DorkyPark and HELLERAU – European Center for the Arts Dresden in coproduction with Schaubühne Berlin. Funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes through the Doppelpass program with the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

Open for Everything is a travel through the stagnation of Roma communities in Europe whose chances to work like any other citizen are rather low, where itinerant traditions have been replaced by sedentary life beside the uprootedness of the group of dancers that move around the world following working opportunities. Since 2010, Constanza Macras has been researching the different ways of life, dance styles and music of the Roma in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In the course of this work she has brought together for Open for Everything a large ensemble comprising Roma musicians and performers, amateurs of different ages, and dancers from her company Dorkypark. It is with great aplomb that these very different people recount their lives and their dreams, their despair and their passions. This journey uses music and dance to lead us through the lives of the European Roma of today, seizing upon, playing with, and depicting with humour the prejudices, clichés, misunderstandings, similarities, traditions, discrimination, poverty and violence. Who is making use of whose prejudices? And who are the true nomads of the 21^st century?

Duration: 100 min.

A production by CONSTANZA MACRAS | Dorkypark and the Goethe Institut. In coproduction with Wiener Festwochen, New Stage of National Theatre Prague, Trafó House of Contemporary Arts Budapest, International Theatre Festival Divadelná Nitra, HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, Kampnagel Hamburg, HELLERAU – European Center for the Arts Dresden, Dansens Hus Stockholm and Zürcher Theater Spektakel. Supported by the Capital Cultural Fund and the Governing Mayor of Berlin – Department for Cultural Affairs and Open Society Foundations – with contribution of the Arts and Culture Program of Budapest. In collaboration with Workshop Foundation. Folklore skirts by Romani Design.