08/19/2021 > FIND programme release: The Festival Internationale Neue Dramatik takes place from September 29th to Ocober 10th at Schaubühne.

Today, Thursday, the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz published its festival programme. Eight productions from five countries can be seen for the first time in Berlin at FIND.
Advance booking begins on 1 September.
 

For over 20 years, the festival, which is unique in Germany, has offered Berlin audiences the opportunity to see outstanding works by international authors and directors. In addition to works that were already planned for FIND 2020 but could not be shown due to pandemic, there are also new productions and panel events on the programme that complete the current festival edition. Beginning with this edition of FIND, Schaubühne is dedicating a focus to a significant figure in international theatre. In 2021, the inaugural focus is on be the Spanish playwright, director and performer Angélica Liddell. Taking the associative theme of »Counterimage and Counterpower«, the festival focuses on productions whose content and aesthetics seek to break prevailing power structures and question and subvert them from the margins. The works by Kirill Serebrennikov, Angélica Liddell, Alexander Zeldin and Édouard Louis, who will be performing one of his own texts on stage for the first time, will be complemented by discussion events.

 

Artist in Focus: Angélica Liddells unique work is visually inspired by Western painting and draws on the tradition of the Spanish surrealists, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and 20th century countercultures. As an artist, Liddell connects a wide range of rebellious thinking from Diderot to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Hawthorne, Genet, Foucault and her own razor-sharp analysis of contemporary society. In addition to the performances and for the entire duration of the festival, we will be hosting online screenings of groundbreaking productions from the artist’s earlier work.

In her latest production »Liebestod« Liddell combines Richard Wagner’s myth and music with the story of the legendary revolutionary bullfighter Juan Belmonte. Conjuring up love and death, she thus continues her search for the sublime in tragedy. Her play criticises a present that is increasingly losing touch with spirituality and transcendence in favour of a seemingly well-meaning culture that focuses on reconciliation and consensus. In »The Scarlet Letter«, Angélica Liddell immerses herself in the universe of a dystopian society that is hostile to art and is constructed of disparate elements including the puritanism of 19th century America — the setting of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s eponymous novel — and the dictatorship in Ray Bradbury’s »Fahrenheit 451«. This society is symbolic of a present in which art and philosophy are stigmatised in a manner similar to the way in which adultery was treated by Puritanism. And yet those branded with the scarlet »A« — then for »Adulteress«, now for »Artist« — have the potential to break free from the totalitarian structure.

 

»Outside« by Kirill Serebrennikov (Moscow), who, in spite of being under years-long house arrest in Russia, has impressively managed to continue directing, mirrors his own experience of repression in the character of Chinese photographer Ren Hang, whose works portray, with a nonconformist beauty, a new Chinese generation in all its rebellious will to live — something that stands in stark contrast to the state-sanctioned image of youth.

 

With »salt.«, writer, director and performer Selina Thompson (Birmingham) sets out to write a counter-history of Black British identity that refutes the official historiography as she travels as a passenger on a container ship on the routes along which the slave ships deported her ancestors from Ghana to Jamaica. The racism and patriarchal power structures at work within the modern-

day crew means she bears witness to an unbroken apparatus of hegemony.

Using the setting of a rehearsed play-reading as his starting point, young Canadian-American writer, director and musician Christopher Brett Bailey (New York/London) develops in »THIS IS HOW WE DIE« a fast-paced psychedelic homage to the rebellion of the Beatniks, presented by himself in the style of a Beat poetry performance — a work that constantly treads a thin line between hallucinogenic surrealism, tart social satire and personal confession.

A new addition to this year’s programme is the production »LOVE« by writer and director Alexander Zeldin (London). »LOVE« is part of the celebrated trilogy The Inequalities, in which Alexander Zeldin explores precarious living conditions. In this part, the different needs and fears of the residents in a homeless hostel collide in the communal kitchen.

Also featuring in the festival are the Schaubühne productions »Not The End of the World« by Chris Bush (London), directed by Katie Mitchell (London), and »Qui a tué mon père« (»Who Killed My Father«) by Édouard Louis (Paris).The latter production is being brought to the stage by Thomas Ostermeier and will see Éduoard Louis performing one of his own texts for the first time.

Like the two productions by Édouard Louis and Alexander Zeldin, two panel discussions are also tackling questions of participation and the fair distribution of wealth and resources. »Ungleichheiten im kapitalistischen Weltsystem« (»Inequalities in the World System of Capitalism«) is the title of a discussion between journalist Vanessa Vu and two sociologists, Sérgio Costa and Stephan Lessenich. In a further discussion, writer Daniela Brodesser and cultural anthropologist and gender studies researcher Francis Seeck will assess the increasing social division in our society.

The programme also includes a scenic reading of the play »DRAGÓN« by Guillermo Calderón with members of the Schaubühne ensemble, staged by Bastian Reiber. The occasion is the publication of the project »New Spanish-language drama« with contemporary plays from the Ibero-American cultural area which will be published by the Neofelis publishing house in Berlin. This project and its story will be presented in a panel discussion afterwards.

And finally, our panel discussion »New Drama in Germany and Great Britain« will see young playwrights from both countries reporting on an exciting exchange project between the Schaubühne and the Royal Court Theatre London. British playwright Mark Ravenhill was involved in the exchange and he will also be on the panel. Together with Matthias Warstat from the Freie Universität Berlin and our dramaturge Maja Zade, they will discuss the differences and similarities between new drama in Germany and across the English Channel.

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