Theater

In May 2011, the 11th German Children’s and Young People’s Theater Meeting, “Augenblick mal”, took place in Berlin, and the 2nd “KinderStückePreis” in Mülheim/Ruhr.

Every two years the German children’s and young people’s theater scene meets in Berlin at the festival Augenblick mal (Wait A Minute), organized by the Children’s and Young People Theater Center of the Federal Republic of Germany. Ten curators select five of the most outstanding children’s and five of the most outstanding young people’s theater productions of the last two seasons.

“Augenblick mal” – the festival of ensemble projects and adaptations

There was a colorful variety of forms and content to be seen in May 2011 in Berlin, ranging from traditional theater to puppet and dance theater and cross-over productions, such as A Clockwork Orange by the director and puppeteer Hans-Jochen Menzel, who achieves a very special effect with the interplay of traditional drama and puppet theater. The production of the Constance Young People’s Theater wrests entirely new insights from this difficult story of violence.
Particular emphases could not be made out at this 11th meeting of the festival. But the consistently high level of the selected performances was conspicuous.

All nine of ten chosen productions (a novelty: one theater refused the invitation) were self-developed plays or adaptations such as Live Fast – Die Young by Nuran Davis Calis after Frank Wedekind’s Spring’s Awakening (Frühlings Erwachen) performed by Zwinger 3 from Heidelberg. It seems almost as if literary texts were frowned upon. The self-developed ensemble projects achieved a quite literary quality, as Nach Schwaben, Kinder! (Off to Swabia, Children!) by the Stuttgart Young People’s Ensemble shows. Based on historical material from the nineteenth century – the migration of poor children from the South Tyrol in order to hire themselves out to the rich farmers of Upper Swabia for a pittance – it is also a topical parable about exclusion.

International co-productions

In the accompanying program, Augenblick mal presented three possibilities for a co-production financially supported by the Wanderlust Fund of the Federal Cultural Foundation. For instance, the host, the Theater in der Parkaue, and the Cyprus Theatre Organization from Nikosia jointly commissioned the author Katja Hensel to do research among young people in both Cyprus and Berlin and to develop a play from her research, which was then performed in Berlin and Nikosia in the respective national languages. The collaboration between the State Theater in Oldenburg and the Kopergietery Gent (Belgium) then certainly presented the simplest solution with the non-verbal dance theater piece Waldlinge. The co-production of the Freiburg Theater in the Marienbad and the Dramatic Arts Center Teheran (Iran), on the other hand, entered into the most difficult venture: actors from Freiburg and Teheran stood together on stage, each speaking in his native language. While an actor spoke Farsi, a simultaneous translation was projected onto a screen, and vice versa with German. Simurghs letzte Feder (Simurgh’s Last Feather) presented the famous Book of Kings, known to everyone in Iran and only a few in Germany. Although the performance styles did not always harmonize, the performances themselves were intense and powerful, and illustrated what a successful international cooperation could look like.

The author at the center: Mülheim

The festival KinderStücke (Children’s Plays) has existed since 2007 to honor authors of plays for children and young people. It is part of the prestigious Mülheim Theater Festival, which has been awarding the Mülheim Children’s Play Prize since 2010. While the invitation to Augenblick mal in Berlin is itself the prize, in Mülheim a three-member jury selects a winner from the six invited productions. Here too the performance is an important criterion, as the spokesman of the selection committee, Thomas Irmer, stresses: “All the plays that we found were successful and that we invited are carried by their production”. In 2011 the prizewinner was Michael Müller, who works as dramaturge, author and coordinator of theater education projects at the Hamburg Theater for Young People. The prize-winning play, Über die Grenze ist es nur ein Schritt (It’s Only One Step Across the Border), is an urgent treatment of the story of Dede, who after a long escape from Ghana comes to live illegally in Hamburg.

The play is also a worthy prize winner because Müller brings the problems of refugees very directly to stage through the example of an individual destiny and shows that even an issue as difficult as this can be treated by narrative theater.