NOW! Festival

NOW! FESTIVAL

29 April - 3 May 2020

An audience. An empty stage. No preconceived plans nor ideas. Sounds like chaos? Not at all. Instead you encounter the most skilled crafting of time and space by a group of highly qualified improvisers from all over the world.

The 2020 NOW! Festival — Action Theater™ & Improvisation — brings its program to the Uferstudios in Wedding, Berlin. An incredible mix of improvisation styles crammed into 5 days of workshops and performances. This year’s festival focuses on the theme of CONFIDENCE. 

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Our confidence is shaken by the current overload of information. How do we make decisions? How can we trust them? What sense of agency is needed to know that we have made a good decision? Public opinion seems volatile, a mess, there is no definition of truth, only a series of strong held beliefs and the adherence to fixed perspectives. At the NOW! Festival, audiences witness performers build confidence as they agilely negotiate with the unknown — taking risks, big ones, small ones, journeying through the work, to arrive at dramaturgical clarity.

With a diverse variety of 18 workshops, the NOW! Festival remains unequaled. Topics include Action Theater™, Laban, Solo & Ensemble Improvisation, Instant Composition, Poetry, New Dance, Prop Manipulation, Imagination & Language, Human Voice and Stillness & Time and are open to anyone.

A comprehensive, international view of improvisation tied together by a common interest in Action Theater™, a disciplined form of improvisation performance practice that combines the physicality of dance and the emotionality of theater. By assembling a group of performers and teachers from Australia, Austria, Italy, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, UK, and USA, who practice or have been influenced by the Action Theater™, the NOW! Festival holds a unique position in the world of improvisation. This year the 5 morning workshops focus on Action Theater™ physical theater improvisation training and how it influences our perception of confidence.

Antonin Artaud, French theater director/theorist, once wrote, “Man’s greatest failure was that he looked out at emptiness and saw nothing.“ The NOW! Festival leaps into the void and harvests the fruit of the unknown. Audiences are amazed that the performances witnessed were improvised, created out of thin air.