A training for women with the actress Vanessa Stern and the cultural scientist Magarita Tsoumou. The Graduate School for the Arts and Sciences of the UdK Berlin invites to this workshop of the scholar Vanessa Stern the 24th and 25th of October, 2011.

At: UdK Berlin, Einsteinufer 43-53

The global crisis that we are facing in its complexity today causes the excessive demand of our judgment and analytic abilities. Under the impression to be having no say in society’s developments, women often come to the conclusion to rather keep on meeting current art marketing standards in their ‘Self’ promotion than concerning themselves or overloading with a vast amount of information. Individual work fostering de-politicization and frustration is the result. Massive national dept is increasing further due to securing of the financial sector and programs to support the economy limiting the possibilities for social tasks and will be doing more so in the future.

Within these general relations, the comical can offer various opportunities:
1. Comicality exerts the temptation of intellectual pleasure and that way lowers the obstacles of facing complex reality relations
2. It introduces new criteria to critical judgment and raises analytical abilities
3. It asks for forms of collective perception and thereby creates possible situations of acting together.
4. Its effects cannot be dogmatically reduced and thus makes it harder to generalize ideological reductions of complex relations.

The workshop is divided into two parts:

Part 1:
Crisis, Crisis Management and Protest in Greece
Discussion hosted by Magarita Tsoumou

“Why don’t you sell your islands, you broke Greeks!” the tabloid ‘Bild’ was head lining its recommendation on the resolution of the Greek crisis this summer. But as convinced as the German tabloid and the crackerbarrel has identified laziness, mismanagement and corruption as the cause of the crisis and are calling for stricter obligations as little is often the knowledge of the most recent economic, political and social developments in Greece. This talk wants to give an overview over the course of events of the crisis so far, the crisis management by the Greek government, the European Union and the IWF as well as introduce to the organized protest against it.

Magarita Tsoumou lives in Berlin. She is publisher of the Missy Magazine, freelance journalist and documentarist of the Greek crisis.

Part 2:
Dept crisis concerns us all. Which forms of the comical can be explored in relation to this subject? Can dealing with dept and crisis on stage be fun? We will be attending to these themes for a few hours using elements of story telling and improvisation, failure included.

Vanessa Stern, an academically trained actress, explores the permanent crisis of the comical, in which women who up to today only play a marginal role in the area of comicality find themselves, in her project ‘”HEULEN KANN JEDE. Weibliche Komik in der Krise’. Gender-specific approaches to comicality are being explored as well as the possibilities of comical intervention by women in times of financial and economic crisis, to develop theatrical variations of the comical from one’s own sensitive situation.
Her first research journey has led her to New York. In April 2011 she has called the series “La Dernière Crise- Frauen am Rande der Komik“ to live, which will be taking place once every two months at Sophiensäle inviting women to address their crisis comically on stage.