“Relations” - A Two-Performances Event by Veronika Bökelmann & Moran Sanderovich and Darling Fitch

About

Sisters – אָחוֹת / Veronika Bökelmann & Moran Sanderovich

The performers explore the relationship to their sisters and to their systems of belief: Moran’s sister decided to live in an ultra-orthodox settlement in the West Bank, and Veronika’s sister moved from a small town in Germany to India as a Hare Krishna devotee. Within a structured dialogue, the audience is introduced to the partly absurd routines and daily lives of the ‘absent sisters’ by the performers, who create a maze of cultural choices, corporeal perceptions and gender roles. How far are we from our sisters? How can we still relate to one another when religion creates literal walls?

Dramaturgic consultation: Noa Elran, Matthias Naumann. Produced in the frame of the festival and artists exchange program Performing Encounters. Production manager: Jörg Thums. Co-Produced by Künstlerhaus Mousonturm and the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv. Supported by Auswärtigen Amt & der Deutsch-Israelischen Gesellschaft.

Veronika Bökelmann, born 1978 in Tübingen, Germany, based in Berlin, works at the Department for Fine Arts / Architecture at the TU Berlin. She studied Performance Studies at the TISCH / NYU and at the Norwegian Theater Academy; her own artistic practice explores the threshold between performance and media installations. http://veronikabokelmann.blogspot.de

Moran Sanderovich, born 1980 in Rehovot, Israel, studied at the School of Visual Theatre, Jerusalem, currently based in Berlin. Moran uses sculpture, performance and videos to embody alternative human forms, her work challenges  normative conceptions of bodily limitation. Moran presented her works in Museums, galleries and theaters in Europe and Israel. http://moran.sanderovich.com/biography.html

Everything Possible / Darling Fitch

“I will sing you a song no one sang to me

May it keep you good company:

You can be anybody that you want to be

You can love whomever you will

You can travel any country where your heart leads

And know I will love you still”

-Fred Small, “Everything Possible”

What are the limits of unconditional love? What lives do we forge and what connections can we keep when the first ties made for us are intertwined with mental illness, patriarchy, religion, poverty and intergenerational trauma? What must we finally let go, for everything we are to truly be possible?

Through a series of performance vignettes accompanied by a sound score of songs and texts received from their mother, Darling Fitch attempts to unravel their fractured familial relationships, particularly in the aftermath of Fitch’s departure from an abusive relationship and beginning a gender “transition” in 2015.

Though intensely personal, the struggle for individual agency and growth, and the constant presence of what has come before, come into focus for us all as we seek collective healing and liberation. This performance seeks to ease a burden by bringing it to light, while simultaneously questioning the possibilities for transformation.

Darling Fitch is a US-born, Berlin-based writer, musician and performance artist whose work deals mainly with the tensions between collective and individual identities. Fitch is an internationally active performer and organizer. Currently, Fitch is raising money for gender affirming surgery and planning their third US tour with the multidisciplinary performance work A Stranger Sound. Fitch is non-binary transgender and uses they/them pronouns. http://darlingfitch.com/

http://circle1berlin.com/​