Projects ( a selection)

Elly Jarvis is a Berlin-based theater artist whose work often begins with documentary excavation. Starting with interviews of Berliners, of children or of family members, she lets the answers become generative potential for theatrical images, metaphors and stories. In Blaupause (FELD Theater) she comes together with an audience of children and explores with them the color and weight of sadness; in Subject: You / Me / Us (Berliner Ringtheater) she attempts to discover misunderstandings written between the lines of over in 300 e-mails between her and her queer grandfather. Her work is social and uses theater as a space to convene and create new realities for action, as seen in her lecture performance Bad News (English Theatre Berlin), where she suggests bathing is a metaphor for the privatization and individualization of an act we all do, and argues for more social bathing.

She works often with ensembles of non-professionals, creating scripts that are devised from their fantasy and could only come from that specific group. She gives that fantasy a theatrical method and form, as in Wir müssen weiter at the TISCHLEREI of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, where children found their own city on top of a cloud. At the Berliner Ensemble she co-directed Boysick, a youth ensemble response to Woyzeck. The piece asks which societal influences led to Marie’s death, a death the ensemble considers a femicide.

Her first documentary, Dressing Up Together, co-directed with Lilli Strakerjahn, premiered in 2026 at the Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, screened at Sicilia Queer and was shortlisted for the Deutscher Kurzfilmpreis. With a research grant from the Berlin Senate, she is currently researching artistic forms of protest against ICE in her home state of Minnesota.

Her practice rests on dialogue, multiple perspectives, non-hierarchical ensemble work, and a deep belief in the radical power of fantasy. Her theater uses imagination to create spaces that function as thresholds: spaces in which new identities and possibilities can be rehearsed and embodied.