Rachel Donaldson Clarke is a special guest at the Erzählkunst e.V. Open Stage!
This Stage with special guest and open mic has been running in Berlin Prenzlauerberg for 20 years!
BIG BALLADS - Multimedia Show - in English & German.
Rachel has reinvented the ballad for our times. Why? Because big themes such as democracy, climate change and the future need an art form as big as the challenge. On Fri. 21. November 2025, she will perform two of her big ballads against a backdrop of moving images. She is a pioneer of the Storytelling Short (Film) - and the backdrop comes from her films to the story she will be telling live. Also providing the translation of the spoken word performance. One will be performed in English with German subtitles. And one in German with English subtitles. For Rachel is a bilingual storyteller and poet.
In this age where we live from moment to moment through social media, she calls on us to learn from the past as we move into the future.
Ballad Story 1 / Short Film 1 : Lately, Lorca: The narrator returns from Granada to find that Lorca has squatted her Berlin appartment - fact and fiction merge.
Theme: Spains most beloved poet, Lorca struggled for freedom of expression in conservative times. His work is beautiful and surrealist. He was a member of the Generation 27 and co-founded the surrealist movement with Salvador Dali (his lover) and Luis Bunuel, who mocked him in their film An Andalusian Dog. He was a patriot who loved and wrote about his region Andalucia - and yet was murdered by the nationalist government. Who decided he was a threat and had him executed. His life and death is a warning: You will never be safe under an authoritarian government.
Ballad 2 / Story 2: A Panfeminine Future.
A delegate of the panfeminine world government travels through the city in 2040, to attend an emergency conference. Fact and Future Fiction merge.
This is a vision of a future where more democracy and diversity has led to new forms of decision-making and government. It is deliberately optimistic about the potential of digitalisation being used for more not less democracy. It is a call for debate.
Reinvention of the Genre - BALLAD: A ballad is a story told in verse. Rhythm and rhyme lend the story power and dynamism. Even everyday events become epic. The great poets and storytellers Robert Burns, Goethe and Schiller wrote ballads in their day. The Scotsman Burns recited his ballads to audiences on stages, in salons and pubs, to entertain local audiences on dark nights. Rachel discovered this form for herself when she translated Burns' ‘Tam O' Shanter” (Scots for Tam of the Devil) into German verse. Now she performs two of her own ballads live, each dealing with an important current issue of our time - in English and German. Unlike her other stories, she does not narrate freely here – but of course without a script in hand – because a script is taboo in oral storytelling. Feel welcome, everyone.
The second half of the event is an open mic. Here, people from the audience tell stories freely. Many of them are also professional storytellers, like the main guest. But here they try things out. Just as they have been doing for almost 20 years on Berlin's oldest and most welcoming storytelling stage.
Welcome – as listeners and/or storytellers. Entry is free, donations welcome to cover the basic costs!