Andrzej T. Wirth

This godfather of the postdramatic, born on 10 April 1927 in Wlodawa in Eastern Poland, has always been right where the theatre was blooming at the time: With Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble in the 1950s, with Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor in Poland, then with Richard Schechner in the America of the 1960s and with Robert Wilson in 1970s New York. What Andrzej T. Wirth saw, he analysed and rehearsed with his students at universities in the USA, in Berlin and Sydney – until he founded the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies (Institut für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft, ATW) at the University of Gießen in 1982. Many artists who went on to shape German and international theatre studied here, including René Pollesch, Hans-Werner Kroesinger, Moritz Rinke and Rimini Protokoll.

As of March 2016