Director

Constanza Macras was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she studied dance and fashion design. She continued her studies in Amsterdam and New York. In 1995, she moved to Berlin, where she danced for several troupes. In 1997, she also established her own dance troupe in Berlin, TAMAGOTCHI Y2K, with which she has worked on several projects such as: Face One (1999), In Between (2000), Dolce Vita (2000), Wild Switzerland (1998). All of these plays were conceived as unique projects, performed at specific locations, and included a range of artists from various disciplines. Between 2001 and 2002, she developed and presented the project MIR: A Love Story Trilogy (Prologue, The Conquer and Endurance), which was a cooperation with Sophiensaele. In cooperation with Lisi Estaras, and under the control of four different directors, Macras also launched the PORNOsotros Project in 2002, a performance that deals with the issue of pornography in four brief sketches. She has also held several workshops in the United States, France, Italy, India, Belgium, the Netherlands etc. In 2003, she founded the Dorky Park group, which brought together many of the former actors and directors from TAMAGOTCHI Y2K, such as Knut Berger, Rahel Savoldelli, Claus Erbskorn and Angela Schubot.

Performance

Following her experience working with young dancers on the Scratch Neukoelln production in 2003, Constanza Macras has given the stage once again to teenagers from Neukoelln, in the play Hell on Earth. In this play, Neukoelln teenagers speak from experience – not from the experience of children, but from the perspective of developed young adults – about the difficulties of growing up, the discrimination they see everyday, their desires to fit in, and the problems that occur when they try to adapt. The particular interest of the play is the development of their sexual identity, as one of the key points in the process of adolescence, and what Macras specially focuses on is the development of young women, who undoubtedly face more limitations and boundaries than men, as well as on how the body is perceived from the male and female perspectives. Therefore, the basic question is how adolescents from immigrant backgrounds cope with the multifacetedness of the problematic process of growing up. They try to answer this question themselves in Hell of Earth, where they are finally given a voice:    Constanza Marcas' new dance performance, “Hell on Earth” abounds in scenes in which the clichés about immigrants and their rigid opinions about sexual roles are carefully and masterfully presented, deconstructed, and then easily overcoded, with no pedagogic fervor, so that all that is left, from all the things that make multicultural life on the margins of the social scale difficult, is theatric material quite fortunately used. (Peter Laudenbach: Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Issue 86, Saturday- Sunday, 12-13 April 2008)

Theatre

 Dorky Park is a dance and theatre troupe established in Berlin in 2003, as the result of cooperation between Constanza Macras and dramaturge Carmen Mehnert. Today, the troupe is a blend of dancers, musicians, performers and actors, ranging from 4 to 72 years of age. The troupe’s projects are a multimedial unity of dance, live music, acting, text and video-scenes. Their most significant projects include: Back to the Present, their first project, almost six hours long; Scratch Neukoelln (2003), Big in Bombay (2005), No wonder (2005), Sure, shall we talk about it? (2005), I'm not the only one .part 1 and .part 2 (2006), Brickland (2007), as well as Hell on Earth (2008), a play that brought back the adolescents of the Neukoelln area of Berlin. The troupe has had guest performances in Korea, India, Japan, Indonesia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and the United States, as well as at numerous theatre festival and events in Europe.