At Theater Oberhausen
New Stages South East – New Festival for Young Drama from Southeast Europe
From April 20 - 23, 2023, Theater Oberhausen, in partnership with the Goethe-Institut, presents new dramatic texts from Southeastern Europe as part of the New Stages South East festival.
Young authors from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Greece, Croatia, Romania, the Republic of Moldova, Serbia and Cyprus have written texts for a theater of the future over the past two years as part of the Goethe-Institut project New States South East. Exploring the power of theater, remarkable texts of a new generation have emerged. Ana Konstantinović, Cristian Popescu, Christos Georgiou, Dea Loher, Dragan Komadina, Gerhild Steinbuch, Ivana Sajko, Ivor Martinic, Jens Hillje, Maria Milisavljević, Pro-modromos Tsinikoris, Rebekka Kricheldorf, Tanja Sljivar and Ulrike Syha were involved as mentors.
Between war and crisis, awakening and cohesion, Euro-pa today forms a complex mosaic. How are the social upheavals of the last decades reflected in the drama of today? What is the power of theater in the mirror of nationalistic currents and complex pasts? What forms of theater emerge from the diversity of the regions of Southeastern Europe?
A jury consisting of Dr. Kathrin Mädler (Director, Theater Oberhausen), Berit Wohlfarth (Department of Theater and Dance, Goethe-Institut), Dominika Široká (Dramaturg, National Theater Mannheim), Hunor von Horváth (Head of the German Department at the National Theater Sibiu / Her-mannstadt) and Maximilian Löwenstein (Dramaturg, Schauspiel Essen from 2023/2024) has now awarded the most remarkable texts and summarized them in a shortlist. The jury singled out the following texts for special mention:
ACID BY ASJA KRSMANOVIĆ
Preserving and remembering; conserving and holding on, forgetting, and dying: In ACID, a family seeks orientation in past traditions in an increasingly fast-paced time. "What can we hold on to?" asks Asja Krsmanović's text, meandering between nostalgia and the future, creating a moving outline of our torn present.
A CELEBRATION OF LONELINESS BY KATERINA GEORGIEVA
With great vividness and power of observation, Katerina Georgieva describes the lives of five women who are connected to each other in their loneliness. Playing with the isolation and cohesion of the five protagonists in a linguistically formal way, a feminist text score emerges that is bursting with humor and love of detail and at the same time shows itself to be vulnerable - and thus more than lives up to the exciting ambi-valence of the title.
DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN BY DARIO BEVANDA
In a clever dramaturgy, Dario Bevanda exposes the (non-) reappraisal of the Yugoslavian war and interweaves the levels of past everyday life during the war with the perspective of the present generation. There is a lot of play potential in the personal work of coming to terms with the two antagonists, and at the same time the story is moving because of its immediate and painful topicality.
GENERATION LOST BY GREG LIAKOPOULOS
Greg Liakopoulos (& Kollektiv) describes the stories of his generation - the Greek "Millennials" - with great powers of observation and a pictorial, humorous and musical language. Liakopoulos strikes an almost affectionate, but never indifferent or sarcastic tone to make the tired search for meaning of the "Generation Y" and their lurching between political stance and private withdrawal against the backdrop of the national debt crisis tangible.
I CAN ONLY FALL ASLEEP IF I IMAGINE IT IS SNOWING BY TEONA GALGOTIU
Author Teona Galgotiu takes her audience into a world that is waiting for the apocalypse, but which has already arrived in a poetically surreal now
that is frighteningly like our world. With great linguistic and imaginative power, the end of the world becomes playfully conceivable based on a very concrete family - humorous, unsentimental, and very touching.
In workshop productions, play developments and staged readings, with disco and discourse, the contemporary theater of Southeast Europe can be experienced in April as a multi-day showcase at Theater Oberhausen in partnership with the Goethe-Institut and in cooperation with the drama program of the Folkwang University of the Arts. In addition to the five award-winning texts, other texts created as part of New Stages South East will be presented.
In order to sustainably anchor the New Stages South East authors in the German-speaking theater landscape, premieres will take place in the 2023/2024 and 2024/2025 seasons at Theater Oberhausen, Theater Essen and Nationaltheater Mannheim.
The detailed program of New Stages South East will be published in spring 2023.
New Stages South East
Festival from 20th of April – 23rd of April 2023 at Theater Oberhausen
Leading Goethe-Institut New Stages South East:
Goethe-Institut Romania: Dr. Joachim Umlauf (institution director)
Artistic management New Stages South East Festival
at Theater Oberhausen:
Laura Mangels (dramaturg)