The barrel is brought to overflowing, the air is fattened and all screws are loosened. The Esca-Late Night Show resembles the glamorous idols of night-time television; except that here everything escalates.

The male-dominated late-night business gives perfectly prepared show interludes, hair-trigger punchlines, musical numbers that bring tears to the audience’s eyes and guests in dazzling costumes with brilliantly prepared answers. In short, it provides a wonderful template to break this well-built, detailed perfection.

This late-night show explores the worst-case scenario. The audience is invited to plunge into the abyss together with the Esca-Late Night Show: The show must go down!

The FESTIVALFRIENDS association consists of seven independent scene festivals.

In cooperation with the commissioned design agency, I designed the brand identity for this association.

An additive logo approach shows the structure of the association - as a network of different positions that can be shown in their diversity and different connections. A clear formal language creates a restrained framing, which shows the content accents of the individual festivals and the network formats with a solid colour concept.

The development of the website followed a low-barrier approach. The clearly visible page levels are accompanied by navigation texts in plain language. In this way, we create visual and content-related transparency - regardless of where visitors are.

With the #TakeNote funding from the Fonds Darstellende Künste, it was possible to substantially promote the concerns and networking efforts of independent production managers.

I was commissioned to develop a logo for a first website and future communication events. Based on the network name produktionsbande and the materials provided for finding a name, I was able to derive a visual logo approach.

The conceptual approach was to bring together textile fabric patterns with labyrinthine path structures.

A recognisable logo could be developed with a clear black and white design using classic design modernism. Clear, restrained connecting lines meet expansive, sweeping circular lines. After all, paths are not just straight lines.

In my everyday work as a freelance creative producer, I encounter an often anticipated notion of the scope of production management: project organization and financial administration. Starting from the development of the directing position from process organization to artistic direction, my essays tries to present current problematics of artistic practice and entrepreneurial responsibility of artistic directors. In the connection of art and enterprise, of unique project and administrative standards, I see the producers and production managers as mediators between exactly these two areas.

Production managers and producers, according to my thesis, imitate a theater organization without being theater and without having an organization. From the lack of this organization as a sustainable, resilient apparatus - and this does not necessarily or automatically imply a desire for precisely this - they work out a membrane at which artistic and production processes touch, at and with which a flexible framework and the uniqueness of an artistic project can be mutually dependent.

With my text "Das Andere als Standard", I personally try to conceptualize and locate the field of producing.

It is the soil (of the earth, of the stage), soaked up with toxic materials, that may no longer carry meaning here. But now it washes upwards. And with it the sucking sounds of the mould that we call sad and sombre. A musical-essayistic encounter with mud and showers of dreary surroundings and states of being.

festivalfriends is a joint initiative of the association of regional festivals of the independent performing arts, consisting of Performing Arts Festival (Berlin), 6 tage frei (Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg), Hauptsache Frei (Hamburg), RODEO (Munich), FAVORITEN (Dortmund, North Rhine-Westphalia), IMPLANTIEREN (Frankfurt am Main, Rhine-Main region) and neue unentd_ckte narrative (Chemnitz).

As interim project manager, I develop the basic administrative, organisational and communicative structure of the festival network. I act as an intermediary between the association, the festivals organised in it and the Federal Association of the Performing Arts as the funding institution. With the objectives of the festival association, the individual needs of the participating festivals and the specific requirements in funding administration, I develop a basic structure that functions as a legal, organisational and contentual framework for the start of the festivalfriends' joint work.

A spaceship drifts between planets, between the past, the forgotten and the lost – through the void. Or is something there after all? To get the ship running again, performance artist Asja Mahgoub explores dealing with the unknown while moving through sticky material. She tests narratives of discovery, tales of progress and descriptions of the foreign. What aggregate state are our identities in? The performance Sticky Matter welcomes you on board for this mission. Keep calm and stay alert.

Six performers, countless party props and the question “How many parties have we actually celebrated together?” – What began in 2019 as a theatrical experiment to challenge the zaungäste choir and explore its limitations has long since been overtaken by subsequent events: the subject of isolation and distancing suddenly became highly charged and real. What, then, is left of community when we can only gather online? And is it already a party when we stare at each other on screens while drinking wine? “Ich trinke mein Glas leer und träum, dass es schön wär‘. Ein Chor vermisst Dich“ (I empty my glass and dream that it would be nice. A choir misses you) picks up where “Diesmal machen wir alle alles allein“ (This time we all do everything by ourselves) left off in December 2019. The point of departure are the solos written at the time about loneliness, (failing) to get to know each other, the difficulty of remembering each other’s names, the sorrow and pleasure of missing each other.

This moment, when everything gets out of control! Where you just wanna disappear or wish for the ground to swallow you up. When your ears get hot, the face turns red and your hands just don’t know where to put themselves. Welcome to the universe of pbrty. Would be real nice, if someone could help out. If only the hairy leg could make a clear announcement, just how to put those arms casually into some pockets. But no, everything is always growing, shrinking, too dry, too moist, too greasy, too big or small and weirdly colored. Yeah, just keep staring!

PINSKER+BERNHARDT invite (indeed!) everyone over age 12 to explore fucking pbrty as the ultimate brain-body-killer of all human conditions. The theatre becomes a laboratory, in which pimples and pubic hair take over, while the staff tries to get to the bottom of this absurd spectacle.

The chances of being killed by a falling coconut are higher than the odds of being attacked by a shark. You’re more likely to die operating a vending machine than from a falling coconut. A left-handed person is more likely to die from improper use of a right-handed product than from using a vending machine. Often what we ourselves consider to be probable bears no relation to the statistical frequency of an event, or else not as many people would play the lottery or wait for love at first sight. 

Trip of a Lifetime is a performative city tour with the rather unlikely goal of encountering a single specimen of the world’s largest living mammal, the blue whale, in the city. The whale serves as a metaphor for something unexpected, something sublime, something out of place. You are more likely to be eaten by a whale on the banks of the River Main than to be killed by a falling coconut.

IMPLANTIEREN is a biennial performance festival by ID_Frankfurt e.V. (Independent Dance and Performance e.V.). It emerged in 2013 from the Tanzpanorama and Rough Cuts festivals and, as a format for site-specific performances, explicitly responds to the lack of space experienced by many freelance artists. In addition to nine artistic works, most of which were produced especially for the festival, discursive formats and an educational programme were also developed for the 2020 festival edition. These also focused on the public as well as the communally used space.

JASCHA & FRANZ work with a wide variety of accomplices on the conception and realisation of pleasurable spaces and their content. Spatial design or designed space: for them, architecture and design merge. They create their spaces, installations and designs out of a desire for interaction and participation. They are always holistically participatory and above all collectively conceived. Their spatial and design works are both an invitation and an instigation - to immerse oneself and get involved.

I developed the reference texts for the previous projects of the space design duo JASCHA&FRANZ.

Schreien in angemessener Lautstärke deals with the staging, control and controllability of the phenomenon of screaming. In its cultural-historical development, the scream was primarily seen as a loud, vocal expression and acoustic sign of an affect, but neglected as a technique. Kristin Gerwien (voice) and Moritz Junkermann (DJ) playfully combine the many manifestations of the scream into a sound collage in an experimental set consisting of voice, sound carriers, effects devices and performative interludes.

Susanne Zaun and Marion Schneider have taken the “small world phenomenon”, discovered by social research in the 1960’s, as the basis and starting point for the development of six different solos with performers, who usually stand on stage together as a choir. The six solos are simply sketched experiments focusing on the subject of loneliness. They are episodes in a series. Each of these episodes aesthetically stands for itself, yet – as in every good series – it’s all about the internal references that connect the soloists to one another and allow previous scenes to take on new meaning.

Lisa Schettel, Laura Eggert, Constantin von Thun and Nils Weishaupt consciously bring shame onto the stage. In a major research project, they shared personal experiences of shame, exposed themselves to their own shame episodes among themselves, conducted interviews with friends and family, with researchers and experts.

In their show, they bring these experiences and reports to the stage to show the familiar affect in a new light. It is not about scandals or naked skin. Rather, the team explores how we can experience in which ways our togetherness is shaped through accounts of shameful events. Shame thus becomes a pleasurable search for speaking about what makes us blush and sweat. Can we transfer shame from the stage to the audience? And what happens when shame spills over into the shame of others? What remains of shame when everyone is ashamed? Ideally: the insight that shame does not have to divide, but can unite.

The regime of couples is omnipresent: going through life as a duo is still considered the ultimate relationship goal. While this form of coexistence brings affection and trust, it also contains potential for competition and anxiety. It can feel great and awful at the same time. It can make you both co-dependent and free. In Paare sind feindliche Inseln, Janna Pinsker and Wicki Bernhardt attempt to navigate the ideological map of desire. For this, they transform the object of their desire into … an actual object. “Do you think she fancies me?” they ask as they leer at a vacuum cleaner.

With its animistic approach to objects, Paare sind feindliche Inseln is the great white shark in an ocean of love.

Kristin Gerwien carries us off into an intermediate sphere. She is a musician, performer and costume designer all at once; she created a piece full of sculptural power and a fine sense of tonality that is neither concert nor performance. It is everything at once! The piece by this young artist plays with disassociation and alienation. Gerwien stages and multiplies herself as an artistic character. The cover of a chronicle of possible meetings is opened; it tells of human skin, loss, touch, excess and other chasms between reality and fiction – all accompanied by electronically influenced songs.

We know: 1 and 1 is 2. We also know: 1 minus 1 is 0. But what is already lost in these basic equations: a discussion of those two less tangible quantities that mathematics has been trying to calculate since the beginning of its emergence and at that time still had much in common with its friendly discipline, philosophy. If we try to return to the roots of mathematics and philosophy, of calculating and thinking, we will get to the bottom of what mathematics with formulas and philosophy with words have always tried to determine in the service of science: void and infinity as quantities difficult to grasp or calculate.

ON COUNTING brings the basic instruments of mathematics - numbers, counting, forms, patterns - onto the theater stage in order to consider them in relation to their developers: the thinking human being.