NOW! Festival

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 2019 NOW! Festival — Action Theater™ & Improvisation — brings its 7th year to 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 DOUBT. The world is riddled with doubt these days. The question of how to behave when seemingly incompatible choices arise plagues us. Choices seem innumerable and often overwhelming.

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The group of performing artists will cut holes in the doubt, and illuminate the confidence/ intuition intersection with each performance, using voice, movement, language, ensemble and solo improvisation. Audiences will witness human beings encountering the unknown, as well as the deliberation and decision-making process in the crafting of a dramatic stage.

 

With 15 diverse variety of workshops, the NOW! Festival remains unequaled. Topics include Action Theater™, Laban, Contact Improvisation, Instant Composition, Poetry & Improvisation, New Dance, Imagination & Language, Human Voice and Stillness & Time — and are open to anyone.

 

This comprehensive, international view of improvisation is 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 Germany, Greece, Finland, Austria, New Zealand, Italy, France, UK, Israel, Spain, Poland, USA and Japan, who practice or have been influenced by the Action Theater™, the NOW! Festival holds a unique position in the world of improvisation.

 

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 grabs that emptiness and harvests the fruit of the unknown. Regularly, audiences are amazed that the performance they have just witnessed was improvised, created out of thin air.