Ariel Efraim Ashbel and friends

and friends

Yael Attia

Yael Attia is a researcher and a doctoral fellow at the Potsdam University, developing the project “The Colonial Other of Jewish Political Thought”. After studying Philosophy and Jewish Studies at Tel Aviv University, Yael has completed a Masters degree in Jewish Studies/Theology at Potsdam University with a master thesis titled: “Judaism, Philosophy and the concept of responsibility towards the animal”. Since Fall 2019 Yael is a Doctoral fellow at the DFG-funded Research training group “Minor Cosmopolitanisms”.

Collaborated on:
The Omer Count

Efrat Aviv

Efrat Aviv is a performer, actor and teacher from Tel Aviv. Switching between comedy, TV and theater, she is a founding member of the successful collective “Tziporela” and is Ariel’s oldest friend and collaborator, working with him since 2000.

Santiago Blaum

Santiago Blaum is an artist, performer and musician from Buenos Aires, living and working in Berlin since 2004. His work was presented at HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Sophiensaele and Radialsystem as well as international venues and festivals, and he has been making music for several companies such as She She Pop and Constanza Macras.

Avi Bohbot

Avi Bohbot Studio operates both in Berlin & Jerusalem, and designs across the physical, digital, and spatial. The studio’s commissions range from art and culture to commerce and tech, and specializes in multilingual graphic design, developing typography-based formats in a variety of reading directions and languages. Avi Bohbot graduated in 2010 from the visual communication department in Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. In 2016 he completed his Master studies in the KHB Berlin Weißensee. 

Katharina Joy Book

Katharina Joy Book is a multi talented artist, writer, performer, director, dramaturg and stage manager. She holds a BA from Central Saint Martins College, London and an MA from the Academy of Performing Arts, Prague. Since 2018 she’s working consistently with Ashbel and friends, and has collaborated as assistant director, dramaturge and performer.

Hendrik Borowski

Hendrik Borowski studied at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Gießen. In the course of his studies, he developed performances, audio pieces, videos and installations that were shown at various theatres. As a light and audio designer, dramaturge and performer, he is also involved in performances in changing constellations. As a freelance lighting designer, he has worked with artists and groups such as Paula Rosolen, Billinger und Schulz, Marion Schneider, Joana Tischkau and Susanne Zaun at theatres in Gießen, Frankfurt, Berlin, Hamburg, Mannheim, Marburg, Essen and Dortmund.

Collaborated on:
Fiddler! A Musical, The Names

Ethan Braun

Ethan Braun is a pianist and a composer of experimental electroacoustic music, creating immersive, multisensory environments that integrate sound, body, and printed matter. Working with acoustic instruments, concrete sounds, and sample libraries, he composes chamber, orchestral, and fixed-media electronic music for the concert hall, theater, dance, installation, and video. He studied music composition at UCLA, Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, Royal Conservatorium Den Haag, and Yale University where he received a DMA in composition.

Gaël Cleinow

Gael Cleinow is the incredible tattoo artist responsible for most of Ariel’s proejct-related tattoos, and even joined live from time to time.

Jonas Maria Droste

Jonas Maria Droste is a Berlin based artist and scenographer. His studio practice constantly shifts between collaborative environments and solo endeavours within the field of performing and visual arts as well as product design and R&D.

Maya Dunietz

Maya Dunietz is an artist and musician performing internationally for the past 30 years. She works in the thin lines between music, visual art, performance, technological research and philosophy. Her compositions are commissioned by renowned performers and ensembles around the world, such as Saar Berger (Ensemble Modern), Meitar Ensemble, Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop, Hyperion Ensemble and many more. Her works have been shown in institutions such as Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Arnolfini Gallery, Reykjavik Arts Festival.

Sandra Fink

Sandra Fink is a costume designer living and working between Buenos Aires and Berlin. While studying Textile Design and Combined Arts in the Buenos Aires University and Characterization at the Arts Institute of the Colon Theater, she started to work passionately in Costume Design. She collaborates with theater and performance artists, as well as designing costumes for film and TV.

Jessica Gadani

Jessica Gadani is a singer and performer. Trained as an opera singer in the US, she lives and works in Berlin since 2009. She collaborates with different artists and directors, and as a founding member of Ashbel and friends since 2013, she is the definite Miss Piggy to Ariel’s Kermit, and holds this website’s record for most projects worked on.

Sophie Grodin

Sophie Grodin is a performance maker. Through collective imagining, physical movement and unscripted moments, she navigates fragility and the live negotiation between performer and audience. She gained her BA in London and MA in Copenhagen. 

Collaborated on:
Fire Walk With Me

Mat Hand

After moving to Berlin from England, Mat Hand worked in the theatre collective Gob Squad for many years and have always been interested in participatory rituals. This interest eventually led him to join the Deathcare collective memento, where he works full time since 2022.

Jassem Hindi

Jassem Hindi is a Palestinian/French performer, sound artist and choreographer, born in Saudi Arabia and based in Norway. He has founded the research/performance group “Stranger Within” with Mia Habib, and created a lecture series called Betraying Utopia/Slime Utopia. Since the past decade, he also designs and creates music for choreographers all over the world.

Collaborated on:
Fire Walk With Me

Dolores Hulan

Dolores Hulan is a performer, dancer, teacher and choreographer working and living in Brussels, Belgium. Her artistic practice consists of both working for and with other artists, makers, choreographers, directors as well as doing her own pieces, research and teaching. She has worked with makers such as Mette Ingvartsen, Ivo Dimchev, Eleanor Bauer, Brice Leroux, Vincent Dunoyer, Tale Dolven&Gabel Eiben and Willi Dorner.

Cassie Augusta Jørgensen

Cassie Augusta Jørgensen works as a dancer, visual artist and choreographer. She has a trained background in classical and modern dance and lived and studied at the Alvin Ailey School of Dance in New York for many years. Jørgensen’s desire and goal is to make holes and ambiguous space in film and dance history through expanding the performative field, into pictures, installation, costume, sound and to meditate on new narratives and fiction of live performance and shapes.

Ravid Kahalani

Ravid Kahalani is a singer and musician. Throughout his career, he has been continuously mixing the ancient traditions of Jewish Yemeni music with modern, pop, and electronic music. This approach led him to the founding of the band “Yemen Blues” in 2010. The band released 4 studio albums and has been successfully touring internationally. In 2021, he founded the ensemble “Jewish voices of Yemen”. 

Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop

The Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop was founded in 2006 in Berlin, dedicating itself to the development of new forms of experimental music theater. The members of the ensemble have developed from pure instrumentalists to musical performers and co-authors of these collaborative productions. Kaleidoskop understands music theater as a place of encounter, community and as a place that has the power to imagine other futures.

Dan Kanin

Dan Kanin is a graphic designer and is Ashbel and friends resident digital creator and social media genius. He received his MA from Berlin’s UdK and has been working in HAU Hebbel am Ufer since 2022.

Leah Katz

Leah Katz is a dance artist, originally from Massachusetts, USA. She received a BFA in dance from SUNY Purchase before relocating to Berlin. Leah has performed and collaborated internationally with artists including Kat Válastur, Tino Sehgal, Adam Linder, Alexandra Pirci, Jeremy Shaw/Justin F. Kennedy, Dafna Maimon, Liz Magic Laser/Sanya Kantarovsky, the Deutsche Oper and the Staatsoper Berlin. She also teaches yoga and co-owns the Comedy Café Berlin.

Daphna Keenan

Daphna Keenan is a musician and video artist based in Berlin. She worked between the audio and the visual on film, TV, and theater, as well as composing her own music. She plays a variety of musical instruments, mainly guitars, bass, keybords and drums, and owns a projects studio, collaborating with different artists and institutions. Daphna has been a friend since day one and collaborated on almost all Ashbel and friends projects, using her many talents. Whether she was filming, documenting, editing, directing or playing live.

Studio LABOUR

Studio LABOUR is the duo of Farahnaz Hatam and Colin Hacklander who create works based on sound. They compose ambitious and reverently experimental audioworks, touching on performance, live as well recorded music, spatial compositions and installation. Their practice promotes active listening and a heightened sensory awareness.

Marquet K. Lee

Marquet K. Lee is a Paris-Berlin based freelance artist instigating and developing work across fields of theater, art, and fashion.

Romm Lewkowicz

Dr. Romm Lewkowicz is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. His research draws on political theory, critical legal studies, and ethnographic methodologies in an effort to revaluate our understanding of the history and experience of forced migration, asylum regulation, and post-war European integration. Previously, Lewkowicz has held various positions in migrant rights NGOs, including the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants and the African Refugee Development Center (Tel Aviv), Detention Action (London) and Asylos – Research for Asylum (Brussels).

Rachel Libeskind

Rachel Libeskind is an artist, performer, thinker and (creative) director. Her practice is based in Berlin, Germany. Since 2023 Libeskind is an intimate collaborator, and has established with Ashbel the ongoing performative/research practice “Dialectics of Departure”.

Adam Linder

Adam Linder's works, either for the stage or the exhibition space, incorporate text, props, costume, scenography, printed matter and musical compositions in various scales and with varying emphasis. He has presented solo and two-person exhibitions in Sydney, New York, London, Basel and Berlin, and stage works in HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Kampnagel, deSingel, Sadler's Wells, Dampfzentrale, Redcat. Linder has had commissions from Sydney Dance Company, Ballet de Lorraine, Nancy, and the Danish Dance Theatre, Copenhagen.

Paul Maheke

Paul Maheke lives and works in Montpellier. Across various forms and artistic disciplines, Maheke has sustained a long-term exploration into the ways that marginalised bodies, narratives and histories are made visible and invisible. Working in dance, text, drawing, video and installation, his multidisciplinary work develops alongside complicated ideas abbot body and movement. Between 2019-2023, Paul collaborated with Ashbel and Nkisi on the project “Sènsa".

mma Kgosi

mma Kgosi is a trained physical theatre and improvisation performer and a performance facilitator. They trained with Causing a Scene(JHB), Performance of a Lifetime(POAL-NYC), and Clowns Without Borders South Africa (CWBSA), studied Theatre at Rhodes University and earned their MA at HZT Berlin. Their work often interrogates the premise of identity and nationalism ,revisiting themes on the Black Female Body Politics and Migration. They believe in the power of performance to build a better world.

Collaborated on:
Fiddler! A Musical

Nkisi

The musician, artist and thinker Melika Ngombe Kolongo aka Nkisi produces intense, powerful club tracks equally influenced by African polyrhythms, hardcore techno, and ’70s Italian horror films. The London-based musician and visual artist is one of the co-founders of NON Worldwide, a collective of experimental artists from across the African diaspora. After releasing several digital and vinyl EPs throughout the 2010s, Nkisi’s full-length debut, 7 Directions, appeared in 2019, followed by her new label INITIATION in 2020. Between 2019-2023, Nkisi collaborated with Ashbel on the project “Sènsa” with Paul Maheke.

Björn Pätz

Björn Pätz is a producer and dramaturg. In 2010, he co-founded björn & björn, a company for PR, production and dramaturgy, that produced Ashbel and friends' first pieces. We continued to collaborate until the office closed in 2020. Since then, Björn worked at the Schauspielhaus Zürich and is currently the manager of Trajal Harrell/Zürich Dance Ensemble.

Peaches

An iconic feminist musician, producer, director, and performance artist, Peaches has spent over two decades pushing boundaries and wielding immeasurable influence over mainstream pop culture from outside of its confines, carving a bold, sexually progressive path in her own image that's opened the door for countless others to follow. She’s collaborated with everyone from Iggy Pop and Daft Punk to Kim Gordon and Major Lazer, had her music featured cultural watermarks like Lost In Translation, The Handmaid's Tale, and Broad City among others, and seen her work studied at universities around the world.

Collaborated on:
Fiddler! A Musical

Perel

Perel is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is centered on disability and queerness as they relate to care, consent, sexuality, and personal and historic trauma.

Collaborated on:
Fiddler! A Musical

Eli Petel

Eli Petel / Eliyahu Fatal lives and works in Tel Aviv. He is a conceptual multidisciplinary artist mixing painting, sculpture, sound, video and prints. His work deals with questions of visual perception and cultural and social codes. His work has been exhibited around the world, in spaces such as the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Mishkan for Art in Munich, the Center for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and the Gropius Bau Museum in Berlin. Between the years 2011-2019 he was the head of the fine art department in Bezalel academy for art and design, Jerusalem.

Petra Poelzl

Petra Poelzl is a curator, dramaturge and researcher, working in the fields of visual, performing and performance art. Poelzl studied Sinology, Chinese language and theatre studies in Vienna, Beijing and Berlin. She received her master at the Free University in Berlin and attended the postgraduate program Art Criticism and Curatorial Knowledge at the department of Art History at Ruhr University Bochum. She was a dramaturge at steirischer herbst Festival, Graz, artistic and managing director of Kunstpavillon and Neue Galerie Innsbruck, and is currently working as a curator for dance & performance at HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin.

Yair Reshef

Yair Reshef is an art technologist, programmer and nerd, developing ideas, archives images and robots in the gaps between technology, art and engineering.

Heiki Riipinen

Heiki Riipinen is a theater artist working between Germany and Norway. He holds a bachelor’s degree in acting from the Norwegian Theater Academy and a master’s degree in directing from The National Danish School of Performing Arts. His performances make use of the theater as a space to meet, where the challenge of co-existence is the central drama, and togetherness is the main aesthetic experience. Heiki is a founding member of performance collective “by proxy” and is currently resident director at the Berliner Ensemble in Berlin and Oslo Nye Theater in Oslo. He is not only Ariel's partner but also his best friend.

Alona Rodeh

Alona Rodeh is a Berlin-based visual artist, scenographer, and urban/spatial practitioner working in the intersection of virtual and physical space. Her research-driven practices explore material cultures and audiovisual expressions of feelings of safety. She creates large immersive environments incorporating light and sound, directs short films, publishes artist books, practices night walks, and more. Rodeh and Ashbel are close friends and collaborators since 2003

Liz Rosenfeld

Liz Rosenfeld is a Berlin based visual and performance artist who works in film/video, performance, and experimental writing practice. Liz’s films and performances have shown in international museums and venues including The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw., The Berlinale, The Tate Modern, The Hammer Museum, The Stedelijk Museum, HAU, Sophiensaele and many more. They received an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA from The Department of Performance Studies at New York University.

Ruth Rosenfeld

Ruth Rosenfeld is a performer, actor and singer. She studied electric bass and singing at the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel Aviv and at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin. She was a member of the ensemble at the Volksbühne Berlin and engagements at the Philharmonie Berlin, Theater Basel, Lucerne Festival, Théâtre National in Brussels, Théâtre de l’Odéon in Paris and the Opernhaus and Schauspielhaus Zurich. Worked with Frank Castorf, Herbert Fritsch, David Marton, Dimiter Gotscheff and Jette Steckel, among others. Since the 2017/18 season, she is a member of the ensemble at the Schaubühne Berlin.

Saga S.dottir

Saga S.dottir is a performing artist, choreographer and dancer based in Reykjavik. She is a member of performance collectives Marble Crowd, 16 Lovers and  The Post Performance Blues Band. Her works have been performed on stages, in museums, malls, clubs, concert halls, by dancers, musicians, mattresses, amps, bass guitars, gum, velour, vinyl, skip robes, axe, skate and keyboards. Saga is Associate Professor at the Department for Performing Arts at Iceland University of the Arts.

Collaborated on:
no apocalypse not now

Tamara Saphir

Tamara Saphir is a dancer, performer and dramaturge based in Berlin. Trained both in philosophy and dance, she works between theory and practice and develops both choreographies and ideas. As performer, Dramaturg and curator, Tamara collaborated with Eva Meyer Keller, Santiago Blaum, Constanza Macras/Dorkypark, Gob Squad, Showcase Beat le mot and more.

Tatiana Saphir

Tatiana Saphir is a performer, theater maker and DJ, based in Berlin since 2007. She collaborates with different companies and artists, such as  such as Gob Squad, She She Pop, Constanza Macras and the Social Muscle Club, as well as creates her own work. She is also known as legendary DJ Obstsalat. Putting the “con” in “iconic”, she’s a close friend from the very beginning, and worked on many Ashbel and friends projects

Show Choir

Show choir is a choir for you and your friends.

Collaborated on:
The Names, The Omer Count

Yoni Silver

Yoni Silver is a London based multi-instrumentalist musician and composer, playing bass clarinet, alto sax, violin, piano, voice, body and mind. Performed at many festivals and venues such as Atonal and CTM (Berlin), Tectonics (Tel Aviv), SXSW (Texas), Intersect (London), Donau Festival (Austria), Sacrum Profanum (Kraków), Borderline Festival (Athens) and others. He collaborates with many artists, such as Oren Ambarchi, Maya Dunietz, Phil Durant, John Edwards, Studio LABOUR, Thurston Moore, Steve Noble, Stephen O’Malley, London Improvisers Orchestra, Ilan Volkov and many, many more.

Jan-Sebastian Šuba

Jan-Sebastian Šuba is an actor and performer. In addition to film and TV, he worked with many free scene companies and artists such as andcompany&Co, Showcase Beat le Mot, Gob Squad, Santiago Blaum, Constanza Macras and more. 

Sarah Thom

Sarah Thom is a director, performer and thinker, and one of the founding members of German-British collective Gob Squad, one of the most important groups in post dramatic European theater and a constant strong voice in experimental performance for decades.

Senthuran Varatharajah

Senthuran Varatharajah is a Berlin based writer. He studied philosophy, Protestant theology and comparative religious and cultural studies in Marburg, Berlin and London. His first novel ‘Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen’ was published by S. Fischer Verlag in 2016. His second novel ‘Rot (Hunger)’ was published in 2022. His novels have received numerous awards.

Jeanne Charlotte Vogt

Jeanne Charlotte Vogt is an independent curator, dramaturge and cultural producer. She is the artistic director of NODE e.V. and co-director of the international festival NODE Forum for Digital Arts in Frankfurt. She works as a dramaturg and creative producer with theater makers and performance artists. She is part of the project [in]operabilities, exploring means of multi-sensory and multimedia music making, aiming to create specific aesthetics of access and questioning the accessibility of the world opera and other cultural fields. Jeanne worked as part of the Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm dramaturgy as the artistic producer of METAhub Frankfurt. As part of her work in METAhub, she was Ashbel’s partner as curator, dramaturge and artistic producer the group’s most personal and most ambitious project, “it takes a Village: Bar Mitzvah'd at Forty”.

Anna von Glasenapp

Anna von Glasenapp is a producer, dramaturge and virgo manager of everyone’s dreams. She studied Theater studies at FU Berlin, worked at Kampnagel Hamburg, on the Tanzkongress and with Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop before starting her own free scene production office “high expectations”. Anna is Ashbel and friends production manager since 2020, while secretly working on her comedy career that will allow her to finally get rid of us.

Joseph Wegmann

Joseph Wegmann works with the material of light in the context of contemporary performance. He received his BFA in directing and design at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Following graduation, he moved to Berlin, quickly became the city’s most wanted light designer and even quicker gained notoriety in technical departments all over Europe for his elaborate designs. Alongside his day job as Ariel’s boss, he’s currently engaged in ongoing artistic collaborations with Ligia Lewis and Simone Aughterlony, among others.

Stefanie Wenner

Stefanie Wenner is a mother of three and a dog's companion, and defines herself as recovering philosopher (she gained her PhD at FU Berlin in 2004). In 2014, Informed partly by her training as a Kundalini Yoga Teacher, she and her partner Thorsten Eibeler began working with the label apparatus, facilitating encounters of planetary persons. Since 2015, she is a professor of Applied Theater Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts (HfBK) in Dresden.