Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass – A Stage Production

Kyle Dacuyan

Kyle Dacuyan privat

Kyle Dacuyan is a poet, performer, and curator. His poems appear in Best New Poets, DIAGRAM, Lambda Literary, and Foundry, among other places, and he has received support from The Academy of American Poets, Poets House, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He has shown recent performance at Cloud City, the Institute on Arts and Civic Dialogue, Le Petit Versailles, and elsewhere. He has been a readings and performance curator at Housing Works and Ars Nova and currently serves as Executive Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's. 

Claudia Burckhardt

Claudia Burckhardt © Alice Ionescu
(de)

Claudia Burckhardt (geb. 1953 in Basel) trat nach dem Schauspielstudium am Konservatorium für Musik und Theater in Bern 1977 ihr erstes Festengagement am Schauspielhaus Bochum unter Peter Zadek an. Es folgten Engagements am Schauspiel Köln, am Staatstheater Stuttgart, am Luzerner Theater, am Schauspiel Hannover sowie von 1996 bis 2006 am Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus. Nach ihrem Umzug nach Berlin spielte sie zunächst als Gast am Berliner Ensemble, ab 2011 dann als festes Ensemblemitglied. Heiner Müller, B.K. Tragelehn, Dimiter Gotscheff, Adolf Dresen, Matthias Langhoff, Manfred Karge, Philip Tiedemann, Enrico Lübbe, Sebastian Sommer, Claus Peymann, Leander Haussmann, Robert Wilson –  sind einige der Regisseure, mit denen Claudia Burckhardt über die Jahre gearbeitet hat.

Ulla Haselstein

Ulla Haselstein © Catharina Tews

Ulla Haselstein is Professor of North American Literature at the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Freie Universität Berlin. She has published many works on 19th and 20th Century literature, especially the avant-garde. Forthcoming: Gertrude Stein’s Literary Portraits (Konstanz University Press, Autumn 2019).

Leopold von Verschuer

Leopold von Verschuer © Miriam Knickriem

As a radio play professional and theatre language acrobat, Leopold von Verschuer (b. 1961 in Brussels) has for many years been devoting himself as an actor, translator and director to the complex sounds of difficult writers between Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Zurich and Lisbon. After starting out in the Theater an der Ruhr in Mülheim, he has played at many other theatres including the Theater Basel, the Residenztheater München, the Hebbel-Theater Berlin and the sophiensaele Berlin, the Théâtre National de la Colline Paris, the Gulbenkian Foundation Lissabon, the Théâtre Vidy Lausanne, the Comédie de Genève and the Theater am Neumarkt. Leopold von Verschuer has directed many international free productions and stagings. He is the director of many radio plays for the broadcasters Bayerischer Rundfunk and Deutschlandfunk Kultur, where he most recently (in 2019) made a radiophonic production of Maren Kames’ long poem Luna Luna.

As a translator and writer he has published in French and German with such publishers as Alexander Verlag Berlin, José Corti Paris, Verlag Matthes & Seitz Berlin and Verlag Theater der Zeit Berlin.

As well as many prizes and fellowships, he most recently won the audience prize at the Primeurs Festival for contemporary francophone drama in Saarbrücken in 2014 for Der Monolog des Adramelech by Valère Novarina. His radio plays have three times been Radio Play of the Month, most recently Normalverdiener by Kathrin Röggla in 2016

Tony De Maeyer

Tony De Maeyer © Chris Peetz

The Belgian film and stage actor Tony de Maeyer (b. 1962 in Brussels) studied at the Koninklijk Vlaams Conservatorium in Antwerp. His meeting with Gennadi N. Bogdanov (GITIS Moscow) in Berlin in 1996 was the beginning of an intense collaboration in which Tony de Mayer made Meyerhold’s practice of Biomechanics his own. De Maeyer is probably one of the few actors worldwide to have managed a perfect assimilation of the principles of Biomechanics into his acting.

For many years De Maeyer has been teaching and leading workshops for Biomechanics in theatre schools at home and abroad, for instance the UdK Berlin, AdK Ludwigsburg, Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität Linz and many more. As an expert in Biomechanics he is appointed to state theatres and free theatre ensembles to familiarise actors with the principles of Biomechanics, collaborating with people like Christian von Treskow, Dimiter Gottschef and Darijan Mihajlovic.

As an actor De Maeyer received the Best Actor award in 1993 at the Brussels International Film Festival.

Matthias Rheinheimer

Matthias Rheinheimer © Darek Gontarski

Matthias Rheinheimer (b. 1981 in Berlin) studied acting at the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Academy for Music and Theatre in Leipzig and with Prof. Lutz Lansemann in Berlin. After graduating he worked various jobs - as a sausage seller, call centre agent, cook and barkeeper - in Berlin until he was drawn back to the theatre. His first engagement was at the Volksbühne theatre at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, where he worked with Andreas Merz, Frank Castorf and Jerome Savary. Engagements with the Philharmonie Berlin, the Theaterdiscounter, the Bühne Baden and the Theater in Osnabrück, and others, followed. Rheinheimer has also been performing his solo show Lenz by Georg Büchner at regular intervals since 2013, first in the Rotes Salon at the Volksbühne, then in the Theater unterm Dach in Berlin. In Leopold von Verschuer’s staging of the gala banquet MAUMAU marking the 25th anniversary of the Fall of the Wall in the Theaterdiscounter Berlin he delivered a stunning solo interpretation of Uwe Kolbe’s early poem ‘Gedicht 8’.

Matthias Rheinheimer’s film and television appearances include the films Brecht by Heinrich Breloer, F39 by Daniel Ohren and the series Der Kriminalist, Soko Wismar and the new Netflix production Dogs of Berlin.

Matthias Rheinheimer is currently appearing in William Shakespeare’s Ein Sommernachtstraum (German version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream) in the Theater Magdeburg, in Bezahlt wird nicht by Dario Fo and Die Letzten by Maxim Gorki with director Milan Peschel.

Sarah van der Kemp

Sarah van der Kemp © Claus Willemer

Sarah van der Kemp (b. in Berlin) received her musical training initially in the study programmes musicology and piano. Before taking her diploma, however, she decided on a career as a singer and studied singing at the Berlin Academy of Music with Julia Varady and in master classes with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

She developed a wide-ranging repertoire while an ensemble member at the Deutsche Oper Berlin (2005–07) and the Staatstheater Schwerin (2007–2010).

Sarah van der Kemp made her concert debut as Sieglinde (Walküre) and Venus (Tannhäuser) with the Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra in Hong Kong. In the Cathédrale des Invalides in Paris she sang the alto part in Verdi’s Requiem.
Engagement have taken Sarah van der Kemp to the Dresden Philharmonie, the Staatsoper Berlin, the Festival Avignon and the Teatro Comunale di Ferrara (Impromptu by Sasha Walz), the Festival de Radio France in Montpellier, the Orchestre symphonique de Mulhouse, and many more.

In the concert area her special passion is for the orchestral Lied. Her repertoire includes not only Mahler, Wagner, Berlioz and de Falla, but also more unusual pieces by Duparc and Alban Berg or the première of the Love-Song by Panufnik (Konzerthausorchester Berlin). Together with the conductor Aurélien Bello the singer has developed Lieder programmes for orchestra and mezzo-soprano with pieces by Liszt and Wagner, etc.

Adrian Heger

Adrian Heger © privat

Adrian Heger studied at the Hanns Eisler School of Music, Berlin, and has taken part in the Lucerne Festival Academy, the Schubertiade Schwarzenberg and the Stockhausen Courses Kürten. His teachers include Egon Melziarek, Alexander Vitlin, Semjon Skigin, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, George Alexander Albrecht, Peter Eötvös and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He has been a musical assistant at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden since 2009.

As a conductor and pianist he devotes himself as much to the Classical-Romantic repertoire as to New Music. At 22, under the overall leadership of Karlheinz Stockhausen, he conducted the first performance and CD production of Stockhausen’s Rechter Augenbrauentanz (Right Eyebrow Dance). At the 2019 Holland Festival he will be conducting Michaels Reise um die Erde (Michael’s Journey Round the Earth) and Luzifers Tanz (Lucifer’s Dance) from Stockhausen’s Light cycle (sound director: Kathinka Pasveer, director: Pierre Audi). In Berlin he has worked previously with the Staatskapelle, the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester and the Konzerthausorchester and conducted new productions of Karl Amadeus Hartmann‘s Simplicius Simplicissimus and Mike Svoboda’s The Incredible Spotz in the workshop of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden.

As a pianist he has appeared in the Dresden Musikfestspielen, the Musikfest Berlin and the Ultraschall Berlin Festival among others. He played Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke I-V and VII-IX at the Staatsoper’s Infektion! Festival in the Schiller Theater in 2016.