Performing Exiles: Fear As We Know It

An evening about one of the oldest emotions of mankind: Together with the audience ten artists explore the preconceptions and representations of fear.

Every fear takes us back to the helplessness of our loneliest state and our species’ oldest emotions. Fear takes us to the very bottom of our ancient bedrock and the most fundamental questions about the riddle of our existence. It takes us back to the earliest substance that we are made of – to the primary layers of our individual and collective memory. When fear is with us, we are alone. The day “Angst, wie wir sie kennen” (Fear As We Know It) which is part of the festival “Performing Exiles”, is devoted to this subject: to telling the story of, describing and reflecting on fear as imagination – in both senses: fear as an object of the imagination, as something imagined, but also as its subject, as something that imagines things.

In a dramaturgically and choreographically coherent evening, conceived and curated by the writer and theologian Senthuran Varatharajah and the writer and composer Fabian Saul, ten artists investigate the cinematic, literary, musical and discursive projections and representations, the nature and structure of exemplary symbols, forms and concepts of fear, taking us back to its night and its most ancient heart: to farewells and loss, ghosts and doppelgangers, darkness and demons. Every fear has more to tell than we can tell about it: because the fear we know also knows us.

With Galal Alahmadi, Marica Bodrožić, Sophia Eisenhut, Athena Farrokhzad, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Miki O’Hara, Wouter Rentema, Fabian Saul, Karosh Taha, Senthuran Varatharajah

An event by the Berliner Festspiele as part of the festival Performing Exiles presented in cooperation with the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

Also a part of “Performing Exiles”: 23 – 24 June, from 5 pm, All that is Musical in Us is Memory