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 2017 NOW! Festival — Action Theater™ & Improvisation — brings its 5th year 2-7 May to Studio Verlin (CONSTANZA MACRAS / DORKY PARK) in the heart of Berlin. An incredible mix of improvisation styles crammed into 6 days of workshops and 5 nights of performance, this year’s festival focuses on the themes of voice, movement, language, ensemble and solo improvisation.
With 18 diverse variety of workshops, the NOW! Festival remains unequalled. Topics include Action Theater™, Feldenkrais, Contact Improvisation, Instant Composition, Meditation & Improvisation, New Dance, Imagination & Language, Human Voice, Yoga 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, Australia, Italy, France, UK, Israel, Spain, Poland, 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.