Festival International New Drama
16 to 26 April 2026
Dear Audience,
We are delighted to present this year’s programme for the Festival International New Drama (FIND). From 16–26 April 2026, we will once again be showcasing both works by renowned directors and writers and exciting new discoveries from very different parts of the world – this year from Brazil, Canada, Greece, the UK, Italy and Norway.
ARTIST IN FOCUS With this edition of the festival, we are once more placing an outstanding artist in the spotlight: British director Katie Mitchell is the Artist in Focus at FIND 2026. She has been resident director at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court Theatre and she regularly presents plays at the National Theatre in London, where she was also part of the artistic management. She has directed numerous opera and theatre productions across Europe and beyond and has received multiple awards. Her work is characterised by an innovative interlinking of acting, scenography and live video. Thematically, she explores canonical texts from a feminist viewpoint, generating inventive shifts in perspectives. She has been engaged in an ongoing collaboration with the Schaubühne ensemble since 2010.
As part of the festival, we are presenting a stage adaptation of the prose text »Bluets« by American author Maggie Nelson, adapted by Irish playwright Margaret Perry, in which the protagonist explores her obsession with the colour blue and her pain over a lost love.
Mitchell’s latest production, »Cow | Deer«, which she developed with writer Nina Segal and sound designer Melanie Wilson, entirely dispenses with words: four performers deploy sounds and noises to narrate a day in the life of a cow and a deer. In this work, Katie Mitchell continues her exploration of nature, the environment and climate issues, offering a glimpse into a world beyond human perspectives. The soundscape is created live, allowing the audience to hear the world as an animal perceives it.
This focus is complemented by Mitchell’s production of »Orlando« – a queer biography spanning four centuries of human history, adapted by Alice Birch from Virginia Woolf’s novel.
INTERNATIONAL PANORAMA
This year’s edition features two productions each from Brazil and Norway. In »Stabat Mater«, Brazilian performer and director Janaina Leite shares the stage with her mother and a porn actor. Using the biblical motif of the Virgin Mary as a starting point, Leite evokes images of femininity and examines the historical relationship between men and women, motherhood and sexuality, pleasure and pain.
After football fans insulted Black players as »monkeys«, Brazilian performer and director Clayton Nascimento decided to develop a monologue with precisely this title: »Macacos«. In it, he traces Brazil’s racist history using just his own body on an empty stage: from Portuguese colonialism and slavery to the everyday racism and police violence of the present.
In »Arv og miljø«, an adaptation of the eponymous novel by Vigdis Hjorth (published in English as »Will and Testament«), Norwegian director Kjersti Horn tells a story about a family and an inheritance dispute. Following the death of her father, the protagonist Bergljot is forced to confront her own childhood memories and those of her family.
In »11 ÅR«, written and directed by theatre makers Goksøyr & Martens, the audience sits above the stage and looks down onto a school playground. Via headphones, we follow situations and conversations that would normally escape our attention. The play recounts the story of the suicide of an eleven-year-old girl and the subsequent shifting of responsibilities.
In addition, we are presenting a seminal work by Canadian writer and director Robert Lepage, who most recently directed »Glaube, Geld, Krieg und Liebe« (»Faith, Money, War and Love«) at the Schaubühne. »Needles and Opium« tells the story of a lonely man from Quebec who, in a Paris hotel room, tries in vain to forget his former lover. His longing is mirrored in the biographies of two great artists who succumb to addiction: Jean Cocteau’s dependence on opium and Miles Davis’s on heroin. With meticulous precision, Lepage interweaves spaces, images and times, relating Cocteau’s fascination and disillusionment during his 1949 trip to New York and Davis’s concurrent stay in Paris which captured the imagination of jazz fans and profoundly changed music in Europe.
The Italian theatre collective Kepler-452 is returning to the festival with a new work. The documentary drama »A place of safety« takes us aboard a search-and-rescue vessel in the Mediterranean to make tangible what happens on the world’s deadliest migration route. The production is the result of field research: Directors Enrico Baraldi and Nicola Borghesi accompanied crew members of Life Support, the EMERGENCY ship and Sea-Watch, who appear on stage as themselves to recount their decision to rescue people in distress at sea and describe daily life on the ships of the civilian sea rescue service.
NEW DRAMA AT THE SCHAUBÜHNE
We are also presenting productions from the Schaubühne’s repertoire as part of the festival. In the German premiere of his new play »Egal« (»Whatever«), writer and director Marius von Mayenburg explores how serious we really are about gender equality and the price we pay in our private lives for society’s failures.
»Die Seherin« (»The Seer«), the latest production by writer and director Milo Rau at the Schaubühne, investigates the fragility of our certainties. What remains when war and terror destroy the world we know? What happens to us, the world and art when we observe the suffering of others and profit from it?
SUPPORTING PROGRAMME
This year, we are once again looking forward to audience discussions with the artists participating in the festival. The program will also be complemented by a panel discussion on the future of sea rescue in times of increasing isolation and Carolin Emcke’s »Streitraum« on the topic of »Libertarian – Authoritarian – Fascist – The specific constellations in Latin America«. And, last but not least, we warmly welcome you to celebrate and dance with us at our parties.
We hope you enjoy the festival!
The FIND is funded by the State of Berlin, Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion.
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