About Via Berlin
What happens when you use classical music as your main ingredient to convey a self-written storyline about a topical and social subject, within a theatrical setting?
It might be hard to imagine, but that is what we do with our music theatre company VIA BERLIN
Via Berlin is a young, Dutch music theatre group founded in 2008, when we started off as ‘Nieuwkomer’ (newcomer) at the Dutch music theatre company Orkater. Since then, we’ve reached over 45.000 people with 10 productions and have grown to be an independent company.
To us text and music, as well as the actor and the musician, are two completely equal means to convey the storyline. A continuous (classical) musical line exists throughout our pieces, and often the music even gets the leading part. The text merely gives the outlines of the story, location and characters; the images and music fill in the rest.
All of the performers on stage are both actors as musicians. This way of working creates a tight unity and an organic fusion between the two disciplines, bearing in mind that the individual qualities of the performers are preserved. Making music theatre about a topical subject using classical music as the main storyteller in combination with self-written text, is unique in the Netherlands and abroad.
With social and topical subjects like ‘war’ or ‘illegal immigrants’ as the underlying theme, the plays of Via Berlin are about intimate, personal stories, which symbolize universal happenings.
Our trilogy on WAR was awarded with the Dutch Charlotte Köhler Prize in 2014.
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SHOWS & INSTALLATIONS WE TOUR WITH ABROAD:
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INSTANT LONELINESS & INVISIBLE CITY
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INSTANT LONELINESS
This city is home to hundreds of thousands of people.
And all those people are bubbling over with millions, if not billions, of dreams.
And somewhere along the way, most of those countless dreams run aground.
That’s not a bad thing. On the contrary, suppose all dreams came true, became realities.
A catastrophe.
Of all those hundreds of thousands of people with their billions of unfulfilled dreams, many feel deeply inadequate and lonely.
What are we to do with that mass grave of expectations?
How can a person learn to cope with loss, disappointment and loneliness?
Instant Loneliness is a musical theatre production that takes us from loneliness to connection.
A remarkable guide leads you through a landscape of dreams to an intimate, musical concert of life, performed by eight cellists, an actor and a dancer.
For fourteen years, the Dutch musical theatre ensemble Via Berlin has been mounting unique productions about burning social issues, interpreted through profoundly moving images, music and choreography. Instant Loneliness is the final instalment of Villa Berlin and Cello Octet Amsterdam’s Instant trilogy, in cooperation with the Dutch dance studio Korzo.
Credits
Concept Via Berlin & Cello Octet Amsterdam
Director Dagmar Slagmolen & Pim Veulings
Composer Kate Moore
Choreographer Pim Veulings
Music and performance Cello Octet Amsterdam
Dance and voices Pedro Ricardo Henry & Dagmar Slagmolen
Design Dieuweke van Reij
Trailer
Galery
Interviews
Invisible City
Can I take the words that hurt so much from you and carry them?
In the interactive theatrical performance and installation ‘Invisible city’ you view the city from a single room. A city that seems far away. Looking at the end of the horizon, behind the walls, the doors and through the trees. Taken to the past, to straighten that which is crooked and turn it upside down. And to see what is invisible to the outside world.
Words and sentences that are said casually, indifferently or directly, but which people take with them on their further journey after the contact has ended. They have stuck and we all carry them with us. What words and phrases are those?
Invisible city wants to work with people on a growing collection of painful words and sentences that have been said. Phrases that people say to each other in a romantic relationship, between colleagues, family and friends or just casually on the street.
You can leave those hurtfull words with Theatermaker Dagmar Slagmolen and social designer Madelinde Hageman, and continue your journey through the city relieved.
Credits
Concept Via Berlin
Text & voice Dagmar Slagmolen
Social designer Madelinde Hageman
Installation design Michiel Voet
Costume design Dieuweke van Reij
Sound Design Robert van Delft
Technique AJ ten Napel
