Lunapark Berlin: the story in moving images

The crazy lunapark weekend is behind is and now we're already into new adventures. Here's some (pretty shitty, iphone quality) stuff from there that maybe give some notion of how it felt:

The frogs:


Maya's Dinosaur speakers:


Keren Hulahooping in the bushes:


Maya trying to make the train work after it broke down:


The last catastrophe clock:


People dancing around the burned out man:


I can also write a lot of words about what happened there, but I'm already late to the second day of the Casino project, which is the third project in this internship I'm doing here. So here's just some pix of the wonderful rainbow that came on the first day:

They mean business

These girls charged 10 cents from anyone who wanted to take their picture. 

Hypnoglasses - check!

Testing Yair Reshef's hypnoglasses at home today

Feelings, by Simone/Dunietz

Finally there's a video of a proper performance of Maya's beautiful cover/homage/quote of Nina Simone's version of "Feelings". It was taken during Renana Raz's "YouMake ReMake" evening at Varda studio, Suzanne Dellal center.

Preparing the Catastrophe Clock

Here's a couple of videos I took yesterday when Maya and me installed the Catastrophe Clock at the Lunapark, for the festival that starts today. It works very funny there and I'm curious how the whole thing will be.



Erykah Badu is Funky with a capital F

It's no big news, but thanx to the lovely Johnathan I found that out again. So thanx dude and thank you Ms. Badu for this wonderful mix of funky groovy mind-nurturing sounds

Nina Kulagina

Just a little something I bumped into while researching on Telekinesis for the Lunapark which begins on Thursday. Apparently Kulagina was a top secret weapon! Don't you just love the cold war?



And here's another lovely one, with proper gorgeous David Lynch-esque set and costume design:

Ghost Machine

"Ghost Machine" is the video walk Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller made for HAU1 in 2005, and is now running again, this time with personal iPods instead of cameras. It's one of these very rare occasions when art actually becomes what the dodot (sorry for the Israeli term, it's very hard to translate. maybe "aunties" will do...) would call "an experience". And yet I loved it. It's super simple (you are instructed to walk through the theater which was also a film set, seeing in your iPod screen very theatrical and highly stylized scenes that took place in the empty space you're standing in right now). Somehow, there's really a haunting magic in it just like the title implies. Here's the link to the piece in the couple's website and here's another installation they made called "Killing Machine": 

Is that a wheel in your eyes or you're just happy to see me?

My dear friend Osnat "yos" Kelner is here visiting. We took this picture in the Luna Park today as we were doing some preparations

Announcing the 1st Berlin Mud Wrestling Championship!!!

Here's the mail that I sent today to some performing friends, about the championship that we're organizing at the end of the month. Feel free to use it as an open call! We need you to really make it work!


Ladies und Gentlemen, dear people who make/think of/care about art,


Haven't you always dreamed of "taking it outside" with your best friend/lover/work partner/mom/granny/dog?
Now you have a chance to make your dream a reality and make performance history!

We are thrilled to announce the 1st ever Berlin Mud Wrestling Championship, brought to you by Ariel Efraim Ashbel and Jan-Sebastian Suba!
The championship will take place during the last day of HAU and SCBLM's exciting Luna Park event @ Spreepark, at the end of next week.

In a plastic pool filled with the finest bio-mineral mud available this side of the rhine, pairs of participants will be given the option to fight their loved ones and try to win the exclusive title of the best mud wrestling couple ever!

The championship will take place on Sunday 29.5.11, from 14:00 - 19:00, and participating wrestlers will also get a free pass for an additional day of the event, during which we will conduct Telekinesis workshops trying to make the big ferris wheel move, DJ at the english village for the "Dorf Disco" party, hang out, drink beer and watch the big wooden man that Showcase is building burn to the ground! (german) Info about the event is down here in the attached. 

So, if you'd like to take part in this groundbreaking experience, all you have to do is email your name contact details (email address & telephone no.) to arielefraim.ashbel@gmail.com and we will contact you and fit you in the schedule. You are also welcome to forward this to anyone you think could be interested in getting involved!


PARTY FOR YOUR RIGHT TO FIGHT!!!

gracefully yours,

Ariel & Subi




Whose up for some sensitivity training?!

Perfect frame, perfect costumes, perfect text. This is well done theater! Thank you Iris for once again exposing me to disturbing imagery

Night Light (revisited)

I just thought of a better way to do this

Night Light

Some reflections on oldschool light devices in a couple of bars

Roses, Berlin:


Dalston Superstore, London:

short visit to Londres

So we just got back from 4 adventurous days in Landan town, where we went to celebrate two occasions: Romm's Birthday and the last concert in Maya's series "Hit & Run" in Dalston's Experimental music venue Cafe Oto. The gig was a proper free-form impro featuring some musicians that Maya invited, including the sweet, brazilian born amsterdam based Saxophonist Yedo Gibson and my dear beloved friend Keren Rosenbaum, who just came back with Maya from Amsterdam where they performed Keren's new composition, as part of the Notations 21 festival, exhibition and book launch. Check it out:



At the Barbican, there is a historical, retrospective-ish exhibition featuring three pioneers of the NY 70's scene: Gordon Matta Clarck, Trisha Brown (they love her in London - last year there was a huge tribute in Dance Umbrella Festival - probably because the UK's dance scene is somewhat dull, not to say lame) and one of my all time favorites, Laurie Anderson. Some of the works that ms. Anderson made in the 70's remained beautifully relevant, and also some of them bear funny resemblance to stuff that Maya, Reshef and me did recently, when we worked on "Chikos" and "Friday". And actually this makes me think it's a good opportunity to put some of these stuff here in the blog.
So here is a short clip from Chikos:


And here's a little moment from Friday (also Spartacus Chetwynd's performance which I'm mentioning down here reminded me how much I actually enjoyed that thing we did last year in the CCA in Kalisher and made me realize we should definitely explore it more):


"The way you moved through me" is the text that Anderson assigned to the installation, which consists of a table that upon placing one's elbows on plays music through the wood up the hands to the ears






















the schub listening to the table

And here is a later thing by Anderson, from her seminal "Home of the Brave" (1984):



Continuing the line of sound-art, one morning Dus showed me this amazing video:


Another dear friend I was very happy to meet again was the lovely James Unsworth, artist whose responsible, among many other scandals, to the initiation of the world's first Ninja Turtle Sex Museum:


James invited us to join him to the opening of Spartacus Chetwynd's exhibition @ Sadie Coles Gallery. Chetwynd makes very cool performances and this was definitely one of them. A clearly cool factor was the fact that the gallery's smoke detectives couldn't really deal with the smoke machines she brought in and the opening was accompanied by the alarm. This and the huge rubber slide you could use to get to the lower level were the highlights. And the free beer.

Here are images and vids from other performances by Chetwynd, made in recent years and selected randomly:











A Tax Haven Run by Women from Charlottenborg on Vimeo.

The BFI at Southbank is having a Russian season this year, and we were there as they screened Eisenstein's "The Old and The New", a very weird, almost surrealist in style and approach, epic about the collectivization and mechanization of agriculture in Russian Villages in the 1920's. Filmed in various villages around Moscow from 1927, the work on the film was interrupted when Eisenstein was called to shoot his well known "October" that marked the 10th anniversary of the revolution. Being aware of the new sound technologies introduced during the 20's talking era, Eisentsein wrote instructions to what he thought would be a suitable soundtrack for his film, but he couldn't find the funding to record this score. The BFI gave these instructions to two british composers and commissioned the score from them. So far so good, only thing that went wrong is that these guys are slightly too boring and their music was way behind of this exceptional film. Here you have the entire thing, next time you have free 120 min. I especially liked the bride-cow scene.


And here's just a nice pic, showing Romm, Omer and Iris performing their signature personas:



All in all it was fun, and it's also very nice to be back "home". Funny this word is.

Suddenly Seymour (1986)

Remember this wonderful thing? lately I'm watching this quite often. There's something very special in the set, the two ugly protagonists, the shameless blonde-n-boobs of Ellen Greene, Rick Moranis. Frnak Oz was a great man, directing this and giving the world the gift of Miss Piggy!

Hollywood is an amazing place

I love this trailer and can't wait to see the film. It's so fucked up it almost looks like one of these pseudo-trailers Tarantino likes to shoot. We live in crazy times indeed