Festival International New Drama 2025
4 to 13 April 2025
In the spring of 2025, the Festival International New Drama will once again showcase contemporary theatre authors from the most different parts of the world to Berlin. For ten days, we will be showing new works by renowned directors and authors, as well as entirely unknown companies – hailing, this year, from France, Belgium, Kyrgyzstan and the USA among other places.
ARTIST IN FOCUS
This festival too will once again have at its centre the work of an artistic personality, our Artist in Focus: for this edition, we will be presenting three productions by Franco-Vietnamese director and author Caroline Guiela Nguyen. Her company, »Les Hommes Approximatifs« (»Approximate People«), has brought together the same artistic team in the fields of stage design, costumes, video, music and lighting design, since 2009. Her productions present fictional stories in hyper-realistic settings, which are very strongly inspired by research, travels and interviews, and real places, events and people. Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s international breakthrough came with her production »SAIGON« (2017), a sweeping epic about the fractures left behind by Franco-Vietnamese colonial history in family relations and relationships of love and friendship. The production was presented at FIND 2018 and made Nguyen’s name in Germany. Since then, she has travelled around the whole world, and is returning to FIND 2025 to showcase her work. We will also be showing Nguyen’s most recent work, »Lacrima« (»tear«), in which the employees of an haute couture workshop in Paris, lace makers in Normandy and a beadworker in Mumbai work on a wedding dress for the British royal family. The stories behind the dress tell tales of private and structural violence – and of tears. And, in an exclusive preview, we will be showing Nguyen’s very latest work, the premiere of which will not be till the end of April, in Strasbourg (at the Théâtre National, of which she has been the artistic director since 2023): »La Vérité« (»Truth«). The play tells the stories of children who have to act as interpreters for their parents, and thus inevitably take on the roles of messengers and are present at fateful moments – with doctors, the police, or administrative authorities.
INTERNATIONAL PANORAMA
Milo Rau will be returning to the Schaubühne from the NT Gent with his production of »Medeas Kinderen« (»Medea’s Children«). Starting from a real criminal case and the ancient tragedy of Medea, in which a mother murders her own children, Rau’s production gives voice to six children aged eight to thirteen who reflect on the absurd and bloody tragedies of adults and their own (tragic) world.
The great American writer James Baldwin debated with the conservative thinker William F. Buckley Junior at the Cambridge Union Society in 1965. At the centre of the debate was the question of whether the »American Dream« came at the expense of the American black population – which Baldwin vehemently affirmed. In »Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge«, the New York theatre company »Elevator Repair Service« brings the exchange between these two intellectuals back to life. We immerse ourselves in a debate about racism and society that is still shockingly up to date.
»Уя« (Nest), is the first ever production from Kyrgyzstan to be welcomed to FIND. We observe the hallway of a small flat in Bischkek, which various people walk through: a girl who works in the capital city’s clubs, a boy whose father has joined the so-called »Islamic State«, an older woman who has set up an orphanage in her own home, a far right nationalist and a feminist activist. Director Chagaldak Zamirbekov and his actors conducted interviews with members of Kyrgyz society for the play. They weave these together into intimate portraits centred on the question of what terms like home and nation mean to them. In addition, we will also be welcoming two extremely different, though both very personal works from the French-speaking part of Belgium.
For the play »Héritage«, Belgian-Walloon actor Cédric Eeckhout brings his own mother onto the stage: Jo Libertiaux is 79 years old, and worked as a hairdresser her whole life. She married at the age of 19, had three children, built a house, loves travelling, shopping and beautiful clothes, and does not strike you at first sight as an emancipatory hero. And yet, Eeckhout discovers in this woman who wanted to be independent, and divorced in 1982, accepting social stigma and yet building up a new life for her son on her own, a proud fighter. This production is his very personal declaration of love for her.
In Kirundi, »ICIRORI« means »looking into your own inner mirror, facing your story, in order to move forward«. The Walloon-Burundian actress Consolate Sipérius draws on this meaning in order to create an evening of theatre based on her own experiences: when she was 4 years old, her parents were murdered in Burundi, and she lived hidden in the forest with her sister before she was adopted as an orphan in a small, white, bourgeois village in Belgium. For several years, Consolate carried out documentary and artistic research into the topics of the destruction of identity, human trafficking and international adoption, in order to reappropriate for herself this staging of her own story.
The FIND is funded by the State of Berlin, Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion.
