The 10 Productions 2025

By Alice Birch based on Federico García Lorca
Translation by Ulrike Syha

Director: Katie Mitchell
German-language premiere: 2.11.2024
Deutsches SchauSpielHaus Hamburg
schauspielhaus.de

Statement of the Jury

Bernarda Alba is merciless and so is Katie Mitchell’s staging of the play. Their father has barely been buried when Bernarda Alba locks her five daughters up. She isolates them from the world and its desires and hunger for life. This was how the Spanish author Federico García Lorca wrote the play in 1936. British dramatist Alice Birch has created an edgy new version of his tragedy, staged by Mitchell as a hermetic nightmare. Inside a prison-like house on stage designed by Alex Eales, eleven extremely precise actors talk about both patriarchal rule and domestic matriarchy, about superstition, jealousy, abuse and pain. Precisely timed parallel montages, dovetailed dialogues and accurately choreographed slow-motion scenes render this show into a sublime artistic synthesis that challenges the senses. A spectacular production and a harrowing parable on the interrelation between oppression, power and violence.

Novel by Kim de l’Horizon
In a version by Jan Friedrich

Director and costume designer: Jan Friedrich
Premiere: 27.1.2024
Theater Magdeburg
theater-magdeburg.de

Statement of the Jury

With great urgency, Jan Friedrich and his team bring Kim de l’Horizon’s queer liberation story to the stage. This becomes evident in every poetically delicate, funny, fairytale-and-popculture-like and brutal detail of this multi-media production. It takes the award-winning novel at its word and yet creates a world entirely of its own. The production of “Blutbuch” from Magdeburg finds astonishing images for every chapter, every literary tone and every emotion, without ever losing track of the narrative. This balancing act is achieved because the seven fantastic performers form a personal connection with this relentless questioning of self and society, and with the strong yearning for belonging felt by all the multiple Kims in the novel and onstage. It is a show about non-binary identities which proposes a variant of non-binary storytelling. And about trauma, pain and prejudices that we all inherit from our ancestors. It has powerful imagery, a fighting spirit and releases happiness hormones.

By Bertolt Brecht / a sequel by Björn SC Deigner (commissioned work)

Director: Luise Voigt
World premiere: 14.12.2024
Residenztheater (Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel)
residenztheater.de

Statement of the Jury

Do weapons bring about peace or just more war? Bertolt Brecht’s “Die Gewehre der Frau Carrar” (Señora Carrar’s Rifles), first staged by German refugees in Paris in 1937, is the play of the hour. Mrs Carrar wants to save her sons’ lives and therefore initially takes a rigorous pacifist stance. This rarely performed play about the Spanish civil war hits home like a hammer today. Luise Voigt stages it in the aesthetics of a 1930s movie: The set shimmers, the sound rustles and crackles and the landscape outside the window appears as expressionistic as a paper cut-out. Afterwards, Björn SC Deigner’s “Würgendes Blei” (Choking Lead) begins on the ruins of the past – as a piece for Mrs Carrar, a linden leaf, a machine gun and a chorus, as a religious service for the return of the ever identical horrors of war. How to escape this vicious circle?

By Georges Perec and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Translation by Eugen Helmlé

Director: Anita Vulesica
World premiere: 12.10.2024
Deutsches SchauSpielHaus Hamburg
schauspielhaus.de

 

Statement of the Jury

“Wandrers Nachtlied”: French author Georges Perec (1936 – 1982) used Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s probably most famous poem as the basis for his 1968 radio play “Die Maschine” (The Machine). Here it is electrical circuitry rather than human beings who communicate, and an authority called “control” disassembles the text into its individual components. Four human “storage devices” proceed to collate its metrical feet, reverse nouns and swallow letters. Anita Vulesica stages Perec’s linguistic experiment with a cast of six virtuoso performers who play with a kind of feverish zest. The director follows the author’s attempt at systematizing the world and yet she also demonstrates that within the fragility of words, there is a kind of magic that defies all definition. What emerges is a show full of dancing syllables, dealing with language as material, but also with power and resistance and with silence as a political force. An absurd pleasure, woven through with pauses of a weightless stillness. Funny, serious, trashy and, on occasion, pausing quietly o’er all the hilltops.

By Sam Max
German translation by Wilke Weermann

Director: Ersan Mondtag
Premiere: 29.9.2024
Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden
staatstheater-wiesbaden.de

Statement of the Jury

This play fits Ersan Mondtag’s nightmarish theatre language like a glove. In the text by dramatist Sam Max from New York, meaning is assembled like a puzzle where all the pieces find their places only at the end. Mondtag’s staging is peopled by stylised, artificial characters whose shells break open bit by bit. Biographical facts come to light, levels of time and reality become more relatable. The balance of power, on the other hand, appears more and more obscure. What are we watching in Alexander Naumann’s fantasy-art noveau set? Is it a consensual gay BDSM-relationship or sexual abuse? Young Connor is at the centre of fascinating loops of light, sound and slow motion, where violence is ever present – even though it is never displayed, not even in Luis August Krawen’s computer-animated videos. This is no show for voyeurs: Instead, this artistic synthesis is disturbing in a unique, almost ceremonial manner, and it develops a hypnotic slipstream.

Performative installation in virtual reality by DARUM

Direction and story: Victoria Halper & Kai Krösche (DARUM)
World premiere: 26.9.2024 (brut Wien)
A co-production of DARUM and brut Wien
Funded by the City of Vienna’s Department of Cultural Affairs (MA7) and the Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport
darum.at | brut-wien.at

Statement of the Jury

Virtual reality has arrived in the theatre, even if both are still often wary of each other. This VR-experience by the duo DARUM (Victoria Halper and Kai Krösche) looks at virtual worlds, and more specifically at the remnants of our daily interactions in the web: Memories of ephemera that never fade. How many of these data heaps can the net endure? Do we have any kind of responsibility for them? Could we even – love them? When audience members put on a pair of VR-goggles, they receive an area of 9.6m². The company IRL (Imaginary Reality Landscapes) then asks them to check virtual ruins that have not been accessed for a long time. The task is to decide what should be permanently deleted and what is to be absorbed into the metaverse. But then, the virtual realm takes the examiners hostage, and a deeply moving story unfolds; a story that tests our relationship with digital legacies and sets new standards of virtual storytelling. Is this still theatre or is it theatre yet?

By Pollesch/Hinrichs
Text: René Pollesch
World premiere: 11.2.2024
Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz
volksbuehne.berlin

Statement of the Jury

The saddest show of the past year, a sudden severance and a legacy: René Pollesch’s untimely death can no longer be separated from this, his final work. But even regardless of its grievous circumstances, “ja nichts ist ok” is a culmination of the longstanding, close co-operation with his ally Fabian Hinrichs. In a shared flat with none of the other residents present, Hinrichs literally acts himself to pieces, while images of war are flickering across TV-screens. “Is it a crime to be cheerful?” he asks at one point, and in moments like these, the irresolvable contradictions of our time appear to crystallise in a manner that is seldom seen in the theatre. A hyper-reflected world-weariness expands towards the edges of the absurd. Finally, the protagonist, and with him the author and his text, are buried underneath the warm bodies of extras. Just an end, and yet a farewell made of embraces.

An encounter with Pina Bausch’s piece “Kontakthof” (1978)

Conceived and directed by Meryl Tankard
World premiere: 26.11.2024 (Opernhaus Wuppertal)
A production of Sadler’s Wells, Pina Bausch Foundation and Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch.
Co-produced with Amare (The Hague), LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura, Festspielhaus St. Pölten, Seongnam Arts Center and China Shanghai International Arts Festival and supported as a contribution to the preparation of the Pina Bausch Centre with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and the City of Wuppertal.
pina-bausch.de

Statement of the Jury

Pina Bausch’s 1978 piece “Kontakthof” is one of the legendary, almost cultishly worshipped works with which she revolutionised dance theatre in those days. In the face of this overwhelming background, Meryl Tankard’s appropriation, created 46 years later, at first glance might seem to be a work that aims to memorialise Pina Bausch. This impression, however, is misleading. Tankard was among the original “Kontakthof”-ensemble in 1978 and now dances parts of the initial choreography with eight other members of the former company. She combines excerpts of historic “Kontakthof”-recordings with the movements of the aged dancers. What emerges is a complex and magical dialogue between past and present that consistently defies all classification.

Opera performance by Florentina Holzinger, featuring Paul Hindemith’s opera “Sancta Susanna”, spiritual works and new compositions by Johanna Doderer, Born in Flamez, Stefan Schneider et al.  

Director, choreographer and performance: Florentina Holzinger
Premiere: 30.5.2024 (Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater)
A production by Florentina Holzinger/Spirit, neon lobster, Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater and Staatsoper Stuttgart in co-production with Wiener Festwochen | Freie Republik Wien and Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz (in co-operation with Komische Oper Berlin), Opera Ballet Vlaanderen, Julidans and Theater Rotterdam.
Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Ammodo, and the City of Vienna’s Department for Cultural Affairs.
mecklenburgisches-staatstheater.de | staatstheater-stuttgart.de | volksbuehne.berlin

Statement of the Jury

Isn’t there a little bit of sorcery in every mass? Don’t they turn bread into flesh, wine into blood? Florentina Holzinger uses Paul Hindemith’s short opera “Sancta Susanna” about a nun’s experience of sexual awakening as the launching pad for her captivating version of a Catholic service. The show’s basic contrast is set forth right at the start, with two fisting women between a cross and a bouldering wall: In the opera, it is the church’s insignia of sacrifice, guilt and authority, in Holzinger’s physical reading, it is uninhibited sex, transgression and shamelessness. Her queer-feminist company overwrites sacred images and interprets biblical scenes as visceral borderline experiences. While half-naked nuns skate a halfpipe, there is a rotating female pope, a magician performs miracles and a vagrant called Jesus accosts the audience. The transubstantiation is also executed quite literally as a variety of body suspension. But ultimately, this orgy of intercourse wants to be more than kink and provocation: It holds out its hands to the audience with the message “Don’t dream it, be it!”

Based on the novel by Dinçer Güçyeter
In an adaptation by Hakan Savaş Mican

Director: Hakan Savaş Mican
World premiere: 6.4.2024
Maxim Gorki Theater
gorki.de

Statement of the Jury

Did Fatma ever have a chance to dance, to float along in high heels, to enjoy sex? Or was her entire lifetime spent as a “silent wife, devoted mother, functioning factory worker”? Right at the start of the show, Dinçer grieves for the side of his mother that she could not live. Hakan Savaş Mican, who has repeatedly explored generational conflicts among Turkish migrants and their long-untold biographies, has adapted Dinçer Güçyeter’s auto-fictional debut novel, creating an equally sensitive and dignified mother-son-portrait for two exceptional actors: Sesede Terziyan as the mother who is perpetually humiliated and grows hard in her perseverance, and Taner Şahintürk as the son who subverts her expectations by becoming an artist. They both fill their characters with zest for life and ready wit, giving these two people who have stayed close in spite of all their estrangement a dry sense of humour and tear-wrenching ardency. The live band, led by Peer Neumann and cleverly integrated into the events on stage, contribute songs ranging from Sezen Aksu to Sisters of Mercy and help the characters to overcome their silence.