Maria Buzhor

Dramaturg, performer – Berlin, Germany
Participant International Forum 2024

Maria Buzhor was born in Odessa and studied philosophy and English philology in Berlin and Paris. As a freelance dramaturg and performer, and member of the musical theatre collective Hauen und Stechen, she develops cross-genre performances that appropriate the classical opera repertoire and its female characters in a manner that is both political and accessible to the audience. For this collective, Maria Buzhor has written numerous theatre texts and new interpretations of familiar libretti. Most recently, she translated parts of Tchaikovsky’s opera about Jeanne d’Arc into Ukrainian. 

With director Julia Lwowsky, she founded the ensemble Trisolde for radically inclusive musical theatre, which aims to deconstruct opera as an elitist genre that requires a great deal of previous skills and knowledge. After “Tristan und Isolde” with Theater HORA, they are currently developing an interpretation of Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal” with the Berlin-based Theater Thikwa. Her libretto for the inclusive village opera “Nacht von Allerheiligen”, directed by Georg Schütky, received the 2022 Folk Theatre Award of the State of Styria.

In 2022, Maria Buzhor curated the festival Sound of the City for Wuppertal Opera, in which she brought Wuppertal’s martial arts scene and professional female Ukrainian fencers together with members of the opera ensemble.