Sideshow

Richard Lowdon (Forced Entertainment)

Festival Center

There is so much bad news, at some point you just have to say enough is enough. It’s time for a night off. Somewhere that’s definitely going to be open, with the right beer and the right wine and where your friends are already there, leaning against the bar. Where you can finally focus on the important things: the ones that don’t really matter. The Impulse Festival bar will only be around for a few days but perhaps it’s only just been discovered, an eternal oasis, hidden away, that can only be reached by a path through sterile university hallways.
In ‘Sideshow’, Richard Lowdon, founder member and stage designer of the legendary Sheffield-based company Forced Entertainment that has influenced entire generations of independent theater-makers, creates a place of rather helpless distraction – while everything outside is going to the dogs. Taking its name from English fairs and community fetes where modest attractions are offered along with the right drinks, Impulse’s ‘Sideshow’ is also somewhere to take your mind off the urgent and badly repressed problems of our time which only occasionally manage to peek through the gaps.
Lowdon transforms studiobühneköln’s rehearsal room – complete with the inviting garden next door – into a pub that is lost in time, a theatrical installation of community where audiences and artists can find each other every night before and after the performances. Talking or not, drinking, dancing at the bar in the middle of an indoor forest with a view of the semi-circular variety stage where Dennis Deter’s seamen say a longing goodbye to the masculine world or the vodka-fueled Davis Freeman and Jerry Gillick elicit promises from us for a better world. Meanwhile signs shine through the window from the garden outside, describing services in the past tense: „dreams fulfilled“, „beer sold“, „organs removed“…
For the duration of the festival ‘Sideshow’ will become a venue for parties, concerts, live reviews, readings and artists in conversation: a space for discourse and discussion. Richard Lowdon, temporary pub landlord, will act as Master of Ceremonies along with Phil Hayes and a retro old school jazz combo to host the opening party and – like all good landlords – he will also stand at the bar during Impulse and make his own interventions in the nightly program. Clear the stage for the theater that’s offstage!

„Speak Easy“
The myth is intractable: For the longest time German criminal law assumed theater actors to be at diminished criminal capacity for at least 30 minutes after their performances. „Speak Easy“ is a brief Q&A by Richard Lowdon with the performers and actors of the festival following the traces of their diminished capacities.

Fr, 23 June, from 9 PM
Grand Opening

See the full „Sideshow“ program here

OPENING HOURS

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