Antagon team
A theater and a big family
Bernhard Bub
Bernhard Bub founded antagon in 1990. Autodidact theater studies, film and television studies. He acquired his practical training in cooperation with initiators of the free theater movements such as Julian Beck, the Living Theater and Ariane Mnoushkine, who revolutionized theater in the 80s. Bernhard feels connected to a theater tradition that experiences and reflects on it as a mean of communication in a constantly changing society. As a visionary, he stands for the process of experimental theater development. He is not only the artistic director of antagon theaterAKTion, a choreographer, an actor, a musician, a performer and a stilt acrobat. He is also a bus driver, a carpenter and a set designer.
Josha Erker
Josha Erker is the technical director of antagon theaterAKTion and of the 3 festivals of protagon Kulturgelände.
He is living in the antagon ensamble since his first day touring the world and giving his power and strenght to make the free culture possible.
Barbara Luci Carvalho
Barbara Carvalho is an actress, a performer and a lecturer in theater and dance. She is part of Antagon since 2010. She has a degree in theater education from the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil, and is doing her M.A. Choreography and performance at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Giessen.
She develops educational and artistic projects with Afro-Brazilian and contemporary dance, performance, stilts and physical theater, mostly in public spaces in cooperation with Protagon e.V - friends and sponsors of free theater action. She works on the basis of body theater, feminist theater of the oppressed (after Barbara Santos and Augusto Boal), and the production and use of theater masks, body awareness and physical education. She was a lecturer at Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences and Heidelberg University.
For ten years she has also been the coordinator of the socio-cultural Brazilian-German exchange project "Escuna Criativa" and is curator of the artistic program team at Sommerwerft - Internationales Theater Festival am Fluss. She directs the International Women * Theater Festival in Frankfurt/M since 2017.
Lucas Tanajura
Lucas Tanajura is part of antagon since 2014. He graduated from the Federal University of Bahia. He is performer, clown, acrobat, theater director and technician, yoga teacher, musician, singer and video maker. He worked for eight years in Amsterdam with theater, acrobatic and dance groups and toured with them in Europe, Africa, Asia and South America. Lucas gives yoga and acrobatics lessons at antagon and is jointly responsible for the rehearsals and open trainings. He also takes care of the music and video editions for the productions.
Anna Orkolainen
Anna Orkolainen is part of antagon since 2011. Anna studied at universities in England and Finland (Rockhampton University (London) Northern School of Contemporary Dance (Leeds) and Theater Academy of Helsinki). She is a qualified dancer and dance teacher. As a dancer and actress, she worked in projects for well-known theaters and dance directors such as Slava Polunin, Shusaku Takeuchi and Nina Dipla. She shows one of her best-known solos in the antagonist piece of ginkgo, in which she falls from a balloon filled with water from over ten meters and dances in the air while hanging on rubber bands. Her special talent for movement can also be seen in F.A.U.S.T. III, in which she dances as Mephisto. At antagon she is jointly responsible for social projects, open training, choreography, costume maintenance and design. In the Sommerwerft Festival she organizes the “Night of Dance” and the “Night of Performance” and takes care of the “Russian Corner”.
Ruben Wielsch
Ruben Wielsch is part of antagon since 2013. As a musician and lighting designer, Ruben was self-employed for some time. Also working in the film industry as a lighting technician, lighting designer, director, film editor and set designer, he gained some experience before he came to antagon. Here he is an actor and performer, musician, composer, tool keeper, cleaning fairy, passionate cook, set designer, decorator and chauffeur - and enjoys being active. Recently, his main and creative area has shifted to composition and production management, or musical management of the theater. This includes recording, creating overall musical concepts, training and coaching new musicians and composers.
Julian Boehme
Show, performance, fire and stilts
In Antagon since 2011
Something to do with theater for 20 years, if you want to know why, you can read “The Stone and the Flute” by Hans Bemmann
Studied acting and a semester theology in Berlin
Before and simultaneously writer, yoga teacher, camel driver, shepherd, bicycle courier, gardener, landscape and cultural maintenance. Father of one son.
Benedikt Müller
Performer, musician and stage designer. Firmly convinced of working, learning and living in a collective, he dedicates himself to his career in antagon since 2019. From the beginning, he wants to find ways to engage with theater outside of intuitions and take responsibility for his development. Among his teachers, besides antagon, he counts Carolina Pizarro (Odin Teatret, DEN), Nelson Zanga (Coletivo Sileni, BOL), Ivan Nogales (Fundacion COMPA, BOL), Anton Adassinsky and Elena Yarovaya (derevo, GER/RUS). In search of his artistic expression, he finds inspiration in nature and is guided by his political vision of life in the collective and interdependence, somewhere between Butoh, stilt acrobatics and contact dance.
A first result of his independent artistic work is the duo "caMARá" (2021) with Lucas Tanajura.
Lauren Boissonnet
Lauren Boissonnet started theatre alongside her main studies of languages (English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Russian and Arabic). Very impacted by her first theatre teacher Borja Maestre in the Lycée français de Madrid, one of her pillars on stage consists in the actor’s sincerity. Born in a difficult family background, she aims at passing a social message and a political opinion through her work. This is in what we could call the “search for a way to express the unsayable” that she then discovers physical theatre at antagon, which has become a big challenge to her: How to express a message without possibly using words?
Effi Bodensohn
Effi Bodensohn has always loved to create her surrounding with and for others. Her dream is it to fill the public spaces with art and culture and to make it availible for everyone. Thats why she contributed in pedagogical and artistic, cultural institutions and programs in Europe and collected a lot of experience. Amongst others at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and Art Across The City Festival in Swansea/UK. Since this year she is Early Years Educator. For a long time she expressed herself as painteress visually, now also through physical theater. She has been volunteering for Sommerwerft Festival since 2014, and from spring 2021 she is part of the ensemble of antagon theaterAKTion where she is performing and creating costumes, stage such as the living- and culturalspace of the collective.
Simone Galli
Simone was born in Milano. He studied Cinema in High school, Academy of Fine Arts, and Classical Theatre, experimental artistic research and total improvisation. He worked with children developing his clowning skills. He is deeply interested in alternative cultures: Vipassana meditation, Hatha yoga and animism. He graduated with his thesis on Art & Shamanism showing how poetry is linked to quantum mechanics, and all the forms of arts interconnected with the “Ancient Tree” of native rituals. He is passionate about Butoh, a type of dance that comes from the post-atomic bomb in Japan.
Maximilian Friedel
Maximilian Friedel was born with 120 m/h on the highway. He completed his acting studies at the Accademia Teatro Dimitri, where he focused on physical theater. In 2018 Maximilian created and interpreted his first solo piece "Fremdkörper" with which he appeared in the Teatro Dmitiri in Verscio. In the same year he was engaged as a guest performer at Theater Neumarkt in Zurich. As a finalist in the young talent competition in the Theater Drachengasse, Vienna, Maximilian won the audience award with his self-created duo piece "Zweinsamkeit". Since then he has appeared on stage as an actor, performer, dancer and singer in various theater projects and plays in German and Italian-speaking countries. His cooperation with antagon also became closer during this time, which prompted him to join the collective in spring 2020.
Magdalena
Her adventure with theater started by chance when she was a young girl. As a result, she completed her theater studies in Paris with a one-year scholarship to the Salvador da Bahia Theater School in Brazil. Theater has always been for her and is still a space to experience the deepest emotions, a space to meet other people and herself, a space of the deepest authenticity. She is interested both in the social dimension of theater work and in theater as a means of self-development.
Bobby Packham
Bobby Packham is a theatre technician and musician from London, he specialises in lighting and joined antagon after several years of working at the Southbank Centre - Europe’s largest arts centre. At antagon he provides technical support, plays live music for shows and fixes the bikes. In his free time you might find him building a guitar, singing about porridge or sleeping in the sun.
Max Büttner
Max encountered theatre during his studies of language education in Cuenca (ECU), Bremen (GER) and
Portsmouth (UK), when he found himself more and more drawn towards deeper and more personal forms
of human interaction. As his experiences led him to believe that emancipation of the individual is the
basis for broad societal transformation (and vice versa), he turned to theatre as a way towards this change.
After intense learning periods in communal living in France, contemporary circus in Freiburg, theatre
pedagogy in Heidelberg and peer-led journey education on the road he joined antagon in 2021. He is
deeply interested in the dynamics of theatre-work based on a process of collective living and the potential
for societal and personal change in both. At antagon he likes to employ his body as a performer on stage
and his mind as a craftsman of language and text.
Edith van den Elzen
During her studies at the art academy, she discovered the need of expressing herself through a visual path. Experimenting with painting, photography, performance and conceptual art, she graduated in film and video art. She researched how to find authentic ways of telling stories, how to direct actors without a script. Instead of writing down the story, she put up a social experiment of two people meeting each other. The actual meeting of these two strangers was more important to her than the end result of the film.
She's experienced in making and editing videos or photos, a skill she uses in antagon helping with live streams, making creative visuals and videos.
She finds that living in a community is an open book to observe people and relations, to observe the theatre process closely, to discover her own body through physical action and to experience different ways of living in a structure that feels more natural to her.
Anna D'Errico
Anna D’Errico is a performer, author, smell expert and neuroscientist.
She did her studies on dance-theater and dance alongside her studies in
neurobiology. Those two sides of her work were always in connection
crossing each other multiple times.
The science: neuroscience and neuroaesthetics – finding out how our
brain perceive beauty, embodies, and senses the external world.
The art: her background comes from physical theater and dance-theater
mainly; she merges elements from traditional dances, Butoh (school of
Atsushi Takenouchi) and theoretical studies from theater anthropology
and dance-theater.
In between: the smell – Anna is interested in, and works with odors, and
odor perception, in connection with movement and the performance
space.
She loves the smell of sea, and of soffritto.
(On IG @perfectsenseblog - It/En).
