Drew Castañeda
Ballhaus Naunynstrasse
Berlin, Germany
I have been living in Berlin just one day short of six weeks. I am interning at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, an experimental theater company based in Berlin-Kreuzberg. The theater is housed in a former ballroom dating back to the nineteenth century. Since its extensive renovation in 2008 (the official “European Year of Intercultural Dialogue”), Ballhaus Naunynstrasse has established itself as an important center of migrant and ‘postmigrant’ cultural production.
The Ballhaus team has been remarkably eager to incorporate me into their working space and individual projects. I have already had the opportunity to help out in several departments within the theater; I spent my first two weeks in Production Management and have since completed various assignments in the Press and Finance departments. These departments operate under kulturSPRÜNGE e.V., an interdisciplinary network founded in 2003 that aims to support and make visible the artistic and cultural achievements of migrants and ‘postmigrants,’ as well as to foster exchange and dialogue between artists, political activists and academics around the topics of migration and urban culture.
At the moment, I am involved as a director’s assistant with “Pauschalreise: Die 1. Generation” and am set to begin working on a second production, “Perikızı,” next week. Both productions will premiere at the Almancı! Festival, a theater/ performance/ film/ music/ literature festival celebrating the 50th anniversary of the official bilateral agreement on labor recruitment between Turkey and Germany. Written by Hakan Savaş Mican and directed by Lukas Langhoff, “Pauschalreise: Die 1. Generation” will open the festival. It is the last in a trilogy that foregrounds the role of generation vis-à-vis migrancy. We are still in the initial phase of fleshing out the content of the play. In my next post, I will elaborate on the interesting process that the director and his team have opted to collect narratives and ideas for the play, which has yet to be written.
Perikızı is playwright Tunçay Kulaoğlu’s contemporary adaptation of an earlier play written by Turkish German playwright Emine Sevgi Özdamar. It will be directed by Michael Ronen, from Israel. I was originally set to work with this director on a play titled Keloglan in Alemania, which would have also been a contemporary version of an earlier Özdamar play performed alfresco, but for whatever reason, the theater decided to produce Perikızı, indoors. I will begin working with this production next week and will have more to tell about it in my next post.