FALLING | IN LOVE

ARISE

Jean Paul GAULTIER

Visual Design Director / Curator / Costume design

Jean Paul Gaultier was born in 1952 in a Paris suburb and began his career with Pierre Cardin in 1970, on his 18^th birthday. After working at Esterel, Patou and again at Cardin, Gaultier decided to launch his own fashion house and staged his first show in Paris in 1976. Critical and commercial success soon followed and by the early 1980s, he was one of the most talked about young designers.

From the beginning of his career, Jean Paul Gaultier wanted to show that beauty has many facets and that we can find it where we least expect it. Intake the unassuming tin can, for instance, which first became a bracelet and later the packaging for his hugely successful perfume. His menswear was launched in 1984 with ’L’Homme Objet’ collection and in 1997 Gaultier realized his dream of starting an haute couture collection with ‘Gaultier Paris’. He was also the designer for Hermès womenswear from 2004 to 2011. In 2015, Gaultier decided to discontinue his ready to wear and to instead pursue haute couture.

Gaultier has worked in dance, music and film throughout his career. His costumes for Madonna’s ‘Blond Ambition Tour’ had a lasting impression on popular culture. ‘The Fifth Element’ by Luc Besson is a cult film largely thanks to his costumes.

In 2018 he presented the Fashion Freak Show at the Folies Bergère in Paris, a revue that tells the story of his life and the fifty years of popular culture through song, dance and fashion. After a nine-month run in Paris, the show is now touring internationally.

In January 2020, Jean Paul Gaultier presented his last haute couture show celebrating 50 years of fashion at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. This huge show featured masterpieces on the catwalk with famous models, VIPs and close friends of the House.

From now on, the House of Gaultier will continue its haute couture activities with one guest designer per season, who will reinterpret the codes of the House.

Having already fulfilled a childhood dream in 2016 by living out his aesthetic vision for THE ONE Grand Show and creating over 500 extravagant costumes, Gaultier is now returning to the Palast for the FALLING | IN LOVE Grand Show as Visual Design Director, curator and costume designer.

FALLING | IN LOVE

ARISE

Oliver Hoppmann

Author und Director

Oliver Hoppmann has been contributing to creation of the Grand Shows and Young Shows at the Friedrichstadt-Palast for more than ten years now. He is also involved in live communication projects as well as show and concert events, making him one of the most successful creative directors of his generation.

As director, he conceived the anniversary galas for the MANEO anti-violence project as well as the children’s opera ‘Nola Note auf Orchesterreise’ for the ‘Classic Open Air’ in Berlin. He was also involved in the renowned B.Z. Culture Prize as director and has worked as a sequence director for Aktion Mensch, Bayer Vital and Roche, among others.

Oliver Hoppmann has been instrumental in countless hit shows since he joined the Palast back in 2011, including ‘berlinILLUMINATED’, SHOW ME, THE WYLD and ‘Keinschneechaos’. He has been the creative director for the world’s biggest theatre stage since 2015.

In this position, he led the creation of THE ONE Grand Show as well as the Young Shows ‘Im Labyrinth der Bücher’, ‘Verrückte Sonne’ and ‘Spiel mit der Zeit’. Oliver Hoppmann worked closely with Las Vegas-based writer and director Krista Monson to co-direct and co-write the Palast’s most successful production to date, the VIVID Grand Show.

With 545,000 guests and ticket revenues of 27.2 million euros, in 2019 VIVID achieved the best results in the Palast’s hundred-year stage history. The most recent hit production ARISE, which Oliver Hoppmann created in collaboration with William Baker, broke the box office record and achieved higher ticket revenues than any other production before. Oliver Hoppmann works closely with producer Berndt Schmidt to help put together the international creative teams for these productions.

Oliver Hoppmann is now involved in the ‘FALLING | IN LOVE’ Grand Show as author and director.

FALLING | IN LOVE

ARISE

Fecal Matter

Costume design

Fecal Matter is a multi-disciplinary brand created in order to express uncensored ideas. The Fecal Matter world presents an alternative to restrictive beauty standards and offers experiences and products that connect fashion, film, politics, performance, music and everything that is forbidden in order to promote critical thinking.

The duo behind the brand, Steven Raj and Hannah Rose, connected over their passion for change and freedom of expression when they met in Montreal, Canada. Established in January 2016, the intention behind the brand name comes from their interpretation of the cycle of consumption and how valueless the material world can be.
Fecal Matter uses social media as a platform to visually share their unique vision of beauty and reality. The duo has been praised for their 360 degree work process as they create all aspects of their work including photography, hair, makeup, clothing design, art, modelling and music.

Their work has been showcased in multiple museums such as the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Museum of Fine Arts (Montreal) and the National gallery of Victoria (Melbourne). They have also worked with Rick Owens as creative directors for the Converse collaboration campaign doing the photography and modelling as well. They are most known for their skin shoes creation, a thigh high boot that resembles the human leg with mutations. This pioneering work has launched a worldwide phenomenon of body transformation within the art and fashion spaces.

Beyond their work, Hannah and Steven’s manifesto “Provoke Society” has inspired a generation to live their authentic truth and express themselves without limits, just like they do every day.

Fecal Matter will present their unique vision of beauty with their extraordinary costumes in the new Grand Show ‘FALLING | IN LOVE’.

FALLING | IN LOVE

ARISE

Sasha Frolova

Costume design

As a multidisciplinary artist, Sasha Frolova contributes artistic expertise in the fields of performance art and sculpture that blends latex costumes with abstract forms. She creates inflatable costumes and sculptures from latex and other materials.

Frolova graduated from the Moscow State Stroganov Academy of Industrial and Applied Arts and the National Institute of Design of the Union of Designers of Russia with a degree in graphic design. In 2006, she completed the New Art Strategies course at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Moscow), majoring in Contemporary Art.

Sasha Frolova is a member of the Creative Union of Artists of Russia as well as the Newest Trends section of the International Federation of Artists.

In addition to galleries and museums, Sasha Frolova also presents her art in public spaces, such as with the modern art project Aquaaerobika that synthesises performance art and electronic music. In 2009, Sasha Frolova was a finalist for the Kandinsky Prize in the “Young Artist. Project of the Year” category.

In 2013, Sasha Frolova was a finalist for the ARTE LAGUNA 12.13 Prize and won a special prize in the “Personal Exhibition” category. One year later, she received the “Alternative Miss World 2014” prize in London, UK. Frolova has participated in various group exhibitions and festivals all over the world.

With her extravagant aesthetics, Sasha Frolova not only adds spectacular inflatable latex costumes to the new Grand Show FALLING | IN LOVE, but also scenographic design elements to the biggest theatre stage in the world.

FALLING | IN LOVE

ARISE

Zoe Wees

Songwriter & Composer

Born and raised in Hamburg, the 21-year-old singer has a very deep connection to music. As a child, she was diagnosed with benign rolandic epilepsy – a traumatic condition that can trigger severe seizures and often leads sufferers to feel isolated.

In 2018, Zoe Wees began collaborating with Nils Bodenstedt, who was one of her teachers at the time and is now a companion and songwriter. Together, they worked on a series of cover songs, which they posted on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, gaining tens of thousands of enthusiastic new fans.

The pair then contacted the award-winning Hamburg producers Patrick Pyke Salmy and Ricardo Muñoz, who brought Wees together with fellow songwriters Emma Rosen and René Miller. This enabled the newcomer to work on her own songs and to tell her own musical and personal story.

Zoe Wee’s powerful and empowering debut single ‘Control’ explores the emotional scars left by her illness. The intimate ballad helped Zoe to launch her career, allowing her to use her expressive, soulful voice to make a complex, touching story universally relatable.

2021 saw the release of Wees’ debut EP entitled ‘Golden Wings’. She’s been Apple Music’s ‘Up Next’ artist as well as part of Spotify’s RADAR and EQUAL campaigns, made the Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ list and appeared on US television, performing on James Corden’s ‘The Late Late Show’, ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ and ‘The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon’. The first two singles received over 2.5 billion global streams.

In 2022, Zoe Wees completed her first own European tour and also performed at numerous festivals, among others in Chicago (‘Lollapalooza’), Stockholm, Berlin, Paris and San Francisco (‘Outside Lands’).

The young singer has now written two passionate ballads for the FALLING | IN LOVE Grand Show.

FALLING | IN LOVE

ARISE

Jasmin Shakeri

Songwriter & Composer

Jasmin Shakeri is a sought-after songwriter, vocal coach and actress. Born in Berlin, she trained in classical ballet and modern dance as a child, and received singing lessons for many years.

These skills, coupled with a great deal of talent, led to her being involved in some exciting projects from an early age. Since 2001, she has been a member of various music acts, including Jan Delay, Ben Becker and Yvonne Catterfeld. She has also been a guest lecturer at the renowned University of Popular Music and Music Business in Mannheim. As a songwriter, she is the woman behind the hit songs of Andreas Bourani and his quadruple platinum album ‘Hey’. Matthias Schweighöfer also trusted in Shakeri’s talents for his debut album ‘Lachen, weinen, tanzen’, which made it into the Top 10 of the German album charts.

As a vocal and performance coach, she supervised the cast for the German musical film ‘Ich war noch niemals in New York’, which among others starred Moritz Bleibtreu, Heike Makatsch, Uwe Ochsenknecht and Katharina Thalbach. Jasmin Shakeri can also be admired as an actress, for example in the mini-series ‘Crews & Gangs’ by Neco Çelik, in Christoph Gampl’s ‘Man of Beirut’ and in the ZDFneo sitcom ‘Deadlines’. She additionally supports various social projects of the European Union with her coaching.

Jasmin Shakeri already showed in the VIVID and ARISE grand shows what it means to write fantastic, uplifting songs. She will now also contribute her many talents to the FALLING | IN LOVE Grand Show.

FALLING | IN LOVE

ARISE

Arthur Mamou-Mani

Stage Architect

Arthur Mamou-Mani (AA dipl, ARB/RIBA FRSA) is a French architect and director of the award-winning architecture practice Mamou-Mani that specialises in a new kind of digitally designed and fabricated architecture.

Arthur Mamou-Mani is a lecturer at the University of Westminster and has given numerous talks around the world on “Eco-Parametric” architectural practices, including three TedX conferences in the US, France and UK. A fellow of the Royal Society for Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), he has won the American Architecture Prize and a RIBAj Rising Star Award, and was recently awarded the prestigious Pierre Cardin Prize for Architecture by the Académie des Beaux-Arts in France.

In 2020 the Architects Journal named Mamou-Mani one of its 100 ‘Disruptor’ practices that are challenging the norms of traditional architecture practice in their drive to bring about sustainable alternatives. Alongside his architectural practice, Arthur Mamou-Mani founded the digital fabrication laboratory FabPub that allows people to experiment with large-scale laser cutting and 3D printing equipment in Hackney, London.

Arthur Mamou-Mani also incorporates his experience with parametric design and digital fabrication services (laser-cutting, 3D printing) into the elaborate stage architecture of the new ‘FALLING | IN LOVE’ Grand Show.

FALLING | IN LOVE

ARISE

Yoko Seyama

Scenographer

The Berlin-based Japanese scenographer and multimedia artist Yoko Seyama specialises in spatial time-based art. She combines organic and industrial materials in her minimalistic and contemporary works.

Seyama holds an MA in ArtScience from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and a BA in Architecture from Musachino Art University in Tokyo. She was the recipient of a grant from the Japanese Pola Art Foundation.

The talented artist has showcased her scenographic work the world over and collaborated with countless dance companies and venues: Nederlands Dans Theater, Staatsballett Berlin, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, Norrdans SE, the National Dance Company of Wales, the National Ballet of Japan and the Astana Opera in Kazakhstan.

Seyama’s installations have been exhibited worldwide, for example at the Centre for International Light Art (Unna/Germany), Borås Art Museum (Sweden) and the LUMINA Festival of Light (Cascais/Portugal) as well as the Lighting Guerrilla Festival (Ljubljana/Slovenia), Vilnius Light Festival (Lithuania), the Wood Street Galleries (Pittsburgh/USA), Bangkok Citycity Gallery (Thailand) and many more.

Yoko Seyama has now created an impressive stage set for the FALLING | IN LOVE Grand Show.

FALLING | IN LOVE

ARISE

Chris Moylan

Lighting designer

Chris Moylan has been working as a freelance lighting and video designer and programmer since 1999. The Canadian is responsible for the lighting design for television productions, corporate events and theatre shows. Stars of the likes of Rihanna, Katy Perry, Nelly Furtado and Paul Van Dyk count among the clients of the Berlin-based expert. Moylan also designed the interactive ‘Lux Partum’ light installation at Motorwerk Berlin.

 For the Palast, Chris Moylan conceived both the lighting design and the lighting and video programming for the Young Shows ‘Spiel mit der Zeit’ and ‘Im Labyrinth der Bücher’. After working on the lighting design and programming for the VIVID Grand Show, Moylan also skilfully set the scene for the ARISE Grand Show.

 Moylan is now responsible for the lighting design for the FALLING | IN LOVE Grand Show, his third production at the Palast.

FALLING | IN LOVE

ARISE

Georges Momboye

Choreography

Originally hailing from Kouibly on the Ivory Coast, Georges Momboye is today a choreographer and director based in Paris. Considered one of the most representative artists of modern African dance, he succeeds in bringing together the best of African and contemporary dance. His shows are an ode to the creative energy of the body and to universal rhythm.

Georges Momboye is the director of the Momboye Dance Company that he formed in 1992, and founder of the Momboye Centre in Paris. Momboye is also the choreographer and director of numerous major events. His dance company has performed at many prestigious festivals around the world. Today, he is the director of the National Ballet and the Cirque of the Ivory Coast, which he directs under the guidance of the Master.

In 2022, Georges Momboye, artistic director and choreographer for the First Lady of the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire, amazed the prestigious guests of the 8th edition of the Children of Africa charity gala. The same year, he performed at the opening ceremony of the Africa Investment Forum organised by the African Development Bank (AfDB).

Georges Momboye creates challenging choreographies for the FALLING | IN LOVE Grand Show.

FALLING | IN LOVE

ARISE

Edesia Morena Barata

Acrobatics Choreographer – Bungee Trapez and Trampolin & High Bar Akrobatik

Born and raised in Barcelona, Edesia M. Barata began her performance career as an elite athlete with the Spanish national team for rhythmic gymnastics. In 1998, she was spotted by the Cirque du Soleil and spent ten years touring the world with the productions ‘Saltimbanco’ and ‘Corteo’.

Since 2007, Barata has collaborated on more than 40 different creations around the world as an artistic and acrobatics coach, acrobatics choreographer and performance designer, stage director, casting manager and event designer. Among others, she has worked with the Cirque du Soleil, 45 DEGREES, Cirque Events and Experiences, The 7 Fingers and the Palast.

In 2020, Barata became the creative designer and artistic director for Limbic Media, conceiving two interactive night walks entitled ‘AGORA – Path of Light’ and ‘ECLIPSE – Walk with Light’. She also co-founded the performing arts consultancy named SPARC Intl.

After demonstrating her skills as an acrobatics choreographer in the VIVID Grand Show in 2018, she will once again be responsible for the bungee trapeze and trampoline acrobatic elements in the new FALLING | IN LOVE Grand Show.

FALLING | IN LOVE

ARISE

Ashley Wallen

Choreographer

Ashley Wallen is one of the best-known, most sought-after choreographers of our time. His work is inspired by MGM Studios classics and includes his legendary show-stopping choreography for the Golden Globe-winning film ‘The Greatest Showman’ starring Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron, Zendaya and Michelle Williams.

The Australian choreographed the spectacular stage performance of ‘Come Alive’ in ‘The Greatest Showman’ with a cast of over 100 dancers that was broadcast live on US television during ‘A Christmas Story Live!’. In 2020, he choreographed for the Netflix film ‘Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey!’.

He has worked with stars of the likes of Robbie Williams, Kylie Minogue and Mariah Carey. and made a name for himself as a choreographer for films such as ‘Moulin Rouge’ starring Nicole Kidman and ‘Friends with Benefits’ starring Justin Timberlake.

The combination of precision and strength can both be seen and felt in his work. It was also reflected in the unique choreography he created for the ARISE Grand Show. Ashley Wallen will showcase his choreographic talents once again in the new FALLING | IN LOVE Grand Show.

FALLING | IN LOVE

ARISE

Boram Kim

Choreography

Boram Kim is a Korean choreographer and dancer whose way into the world of contemporary dance was somewhat unconventional. After working as a back-up dancer for 10 years, he began to question how dance could communicate with audiences and, with passion and ambition, soon started developing his own choreographies.

In 2007, Kim founded the Ambiguous Dance Company, using choreography as a way to explore and overcome the uncertainties that reside within him. Kim’s creative process begins with selection of the music, which inspires his choreography.

He blends movements with melodies and rhythms to create unique interpretations that facilitate communication and harmony. For Kim, dancing is a means to discover and demonstrate the limitless possibilities of nonverbal language expressed through the body.

In the new FALLING | IN LOVE Grand Show he’ll present his unique approach to facilitating harmony between music and dance.

FALLING | IN LOVE