New Directions in TYA (Theatre for Young Audience)

Directing a play is a transformation. What is a director’s role in the collective, transformative process from paper to stage or from research and rehearsal to premiere? How does the idea of a director change in today’s and tomorrow’s theatre? We have asked directors from Germany and Japan to share their answers and ideas with us. Everyone is invited to join the discussion and find new directions for and in theatre for young audiences. This event is hosted by ASSITEJ Germany and Goethe-Institut Tokyo in cooperation with Augenblick mal! Festival.
 

program

Part 1   (with English-Japanese simultanous interpretation) 20:00 　welcome address 20:10 　opening remarks and statement by the directors              (Kenjiro Otani, Hannah Biedermann,               Yuna Koyama, Theo Fransz) Part 2   (with English-Japanese consecutive interpretation) 21:00 　breakout session with Q & A Part 3  (with English-Japanese simultanous interpretation) 21:30 　closing session 22:00 　end

Teilnehmer*innen

Hannah Biedermann, born 1982, studied acting in Cologne and Scenic Arts at the University of Hildesheim. She is a director, dramaturg and performer. As a director, Hannah has worked at a multitude of theatres. She has also worked for festivals such as Spurensuche and Augenblick Mal!. In 2007 she founded her own theatre company pulk fiktion. Her plays have been invited to national and international festivals and have won prestigious awards. In 2014, Hannah Biedermann was awarded the Förderpreis NRW. Entweder und was honoured with the German Theatre Prize Der Faust in 2017. In 2020 she received the Cologne Children's and Youth Theatre Prize for Hieronymus. Productions by Hannah Biedermann can be seen for example at Theater Bochum, Theater Bremen, Theater im Marienbad Freiburg, Staatstheater Mainz, Nationaltheater Mannheim, Theater Oberhausen and Junges Ensemble Stuttgart.
(Trailers and videos )

Theo Fransz was born in 1958 in Vleuten de Meern in the Netherlands. He studied acting at the Theatre School in Amsterdam and worked as an actor in theatre and film. In 1984, together with Jan-Willem van Kruyssen, he founded MUZtheater, a theatre for children and young people, where he worked as an actor, director and writer until 2001. He is now a freelance director, staging productions in German-speaking countries at, for example, the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, moks Bremen, Deutsches Theater Göttingen, Dschungel Wien, Jungen Schauspielhaus Zürich, Theater Konstanz, Theater der Jungen Welt and at SchauBurg München. In 2020 he was awarded the German Children's Theatre Prize for ‘Liebe Grüße’… oder Wohin das Leben fällt (‘Love, yours…'... or Where Life Falls). The jury praised "the poetic-magical realism with which Theo Fransz brings cross-generational father relationships [...] to the stage, creating [...] a reality that can only take place on stage.

Yuna Koyama was born in Hamburg. After graduated from Waseda University in Tokyo with a major in theatre she worked in the directing department of the theater company NLT until 2010. In 2011, she founded her own theater unit "Kaminari Strangers" and she wrote texts and directed all the plays of the series "World Classical Plays" and "Plays for Children and Adults" including for example "The Blue Bird" by Maurice Maeterlinck. In 2017 she translated and directed “Tschick” by Wolfgang Herrndorf at the Setagaya Public Theatre in Tokyo. For the translation she was awarded the Odashima Yushi Drama Translation Award and she won the best director award of the Yomiuri Theater Award for her outstanding direction of “Tschick”. In 2018, he won the Best Theater Ensemble Award of the Sun Mall Studio for Strindberg's "Father”. Recently she directed for young audience “The Night of Wishes" by Michael Ende at the New National Theatre, Tokyo, and "Three Men in the Snow" by Erich Kästner at Haiyuza Theater. (HP Kaminari Strangers)

Kenjiro Otani
Theatre director. Born in Tokyo in 1972. He received Bachelor in Arts in Theatre Arts at San Francisco State University. He is Artistic Director of company ma. He has directed various kinds of theatre; from theatre for young audiences to puppet theatre, from classical plays to contemporary plays, from regional theatre to international collaboration. He has been an Executive Committee member of ASSITEJ International since 2017 and committed himself for development of theatre for young audiences. Currently he is Appointed Lecturer at Toho Gakuen College of Drama and Music, Part-time Lecturer at Tokyo University of the Arts, and a research collaborator at the University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy.
 
Trailer of „Memory in the Bag“
Other videos of the company ma