Institutions, Stages, Festivals

The 2010 Theatre Biennial in Wiesbaden and Mainz gathered together new European plays and celebrated a round anniversary.

The Theatre Biennial for new plays from Europe was founded in 1992 in Bonn. Meanwhile, however, the invited authors and productions travel from all corners of Europe to Wiesbaden and Mainz, where they may quite suddenly find themselves standing on the springboard to an international career. This year the only transnational authors festival in the world is celebrating its tenth anniversary.

Listening to the Serbian theatre author Biljana Srbljanović’s welcoming speech, one could once again appreciate the significance of a festival that has now brought together, every two years for nearly twenty years, exemplary productions of new plays from Europe. What Manfred Beilharz together with Tankred Dorst, Ursula Ehlers and Rainer Mennicken launched in 1992 in the former capital of Bonn was from the outset an ambitious enterprise, designed to treat Europe, which after the fall of the Iron Curtain was supposedly growing together, to an exchange of ideas and aesthetics at least in the sphere of the performing arts.

Only the truth

“Nobody, for example, knew anything about Iceland. We wanted to know what they’re really doing there. And we didn’t want to specify a programme, but only to know the truth”, says Tankred Dorst, summing up the impetus behind the Biennial, which this year is celebrating an anniversary and has from time to time in its turbulent history seemed to be as endangered as Europe itself.

In 2002 Manfred Beilharz moved from Bonn to the Wiesbaden State Theatre as artistic director and took the festival with him on his journey up the Rhine, although the financing of the unique transnational authors festival was anything but assured. Now, however, the Mainz State Theatre is also in on the venture and, along with the federal state of Hesse, the federal state of the Rhineland-Palatinate. This is another distinctive feature of the festival; after all, in federal Germany the constituent states insist strictly on their cultural sovereignty and are reluctant to give money beyond state borders.

Practising solidarity

So during the Theatre Biennial not only the theatre regions of Europe come closer together, but also two German federal states are now practising solidarity and jointly financing the festival, which for its tenth anniversary has gathered together in Wiesbaden and Mainz 24 productions of new plays from 21 countries. Seventeen European languages were heard on stage and the viewer got an impression of the kaleidoscope of theatre languages in a “Europe of Regions”, gained insights into social problems and saw how they are reflected in plays and productions.

In central Europe we now know something more, for instance, about the Icelandic theatre scene, because this year the Mindgroup demonstrated in a wire mesh cage what the global financial crisis does to the people of a bankrupt state. The Mindgroup is still a relatively young theatre collective; on the other hand, the Latvian author and director Alvis Hermanis, who started his international career at the Theatre Biennial, is already a star of the European theatre scene. He travelled to the tenth anniversary of the festival with his elegiac tribute to Marta of the Blue Hill, his play about a healer and clairvoyant well known beyond the borders of Latvia.

Starting shot for careers

The hosts of the Biennial also presented their own contributions during the festival. From the Wiesbaden State Theatre this year there was the premier of Bettina Erasmy’s Das wollt ihr nicht wirklich (i.e., You Don’t Really Want That) and from the Mainz State Theatre the premier of Lisa Danulat’s Uns kriegt ihr nicht (i.e., You Won’t Get Us). The most impressive production came from Turkey. This joint project of five theatre makers from Istanbul is called Ugly Homunculus and presents three extraordinary actresses who run down other women as if they were in a small Anatolian town or the middle of Istanbul. Yelda Baskin, Gülce Ugurlu and Elif Ürse embody all those cultural, ethnic and religious pitfalls and mechanisms of exclusion that exist in a country such as Turkey.

Above all, this independent theatre group and its dramaturge Ceren Ercan, who was responsible for the text, are the sort of discovery which can be made during the Theatre Biennial and which may not themselves realise that they are standing there not upon a stage but rather upon the springboard to a career – like Biljana Srbljanović, who during the Balkan War studied drama and theatre at the University of Belgrade, wrote her Belgrade Trilogy and travelled with it to the Biennial in Bonn in 1989. This journey, too, was the start of an international career.