THEATRE MEETS FILM – BEST OF STREAMING 

In 2020, you went to the theatre by opening up your laptop, placed alone in front of a screen undisturbed by your neighbour's coughing but perhaps distracted by the noise of children playing. The view of the stage was not your own, it was mediated by cameras. We respond to this situation with a series of filmed performances, each of them reacting specifically to this new way of viewing theatre. Each screening is followed by a discussion that explores the interface of theatre and film. 

From the very beginning the Dramatiker*innen Festival has provided a stage for new texts. It offers opportunities to get to know plays. This year, the festival mainly features plays that take part in the Retzhofer Dramapreis. For the first time the prize will be awarded in both categories: adult audience play and young audience play. Moreover, there will be a focus on texts by Dutch and Belgian authors. We open up a text garden in a closed down garden centre. You are invited to enter, to move about freely as in a museum and in this way encounter texts again and again: monologues, short plays, excerpts from plays. 

The expression “Uncanny Valley” describes the gap in acceptance of robots that occurs between a reasonable similarity to humans and approximate perfection. An animatronic double of writer Thomas Melle was created that performs in the place of the author, who is not physically present.

What stirs people in this city? What are their sorrows? How can they be helped? Five writers have researched and approached stories about sorrow, change and healing. The forest the forest reminds us reminds us of Hänsel and Gretel and thus of violence inside families, of loneliness, of absurd encounters ... but also of fairy godmothers.

After a catastrophe has destroyed nearly the entire surface of the earth, a lone anthropologist wanders the remaining area. His mission is to look for signs of life. After years of searching, he comes across a young woman one day. She is carrying an object of inestimable value: a suitcase full of handwritten reports, the final testimonies of a lost world.

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Depending on your point of view, it could be a good or a bad thing if no one is waiting for you. This is what the three very different women realise who have their say in short monologues – all of them played by the same performer. There is an old lady who volunteers to pick up waste left behind by others, a leading politician on the day of her very worst electoral defeat and an actor who is rendered helpless and sleepless by the state of the world and who asks herself what theatre can do to help make things better.

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Notions and conceptions of the fringe are of deep-seated tradition. Miroslava Svolikova develops these further combining archetypal, mythological references with pop phenomena like action movies and iconic characters like Mickey Mouse or the last unicorn. Also Tetris tiles appear to muse on their fate. Virtuosically, Svolikova connects narrative topoi and fragments of fiction.

From the very beginning the Dramatiker*innen Festival has provided a stage for new texts. It offers opportunities to get to know plays. This year, the festival mainly features plays that take part in the Retzhofer Dramapreis. For the first time the prize will be awarded in both categories: adult audience play and young audience play. Moreover, there will be a focus on texts by Dutch and Belgian authors. We open up a text garden in a closed down garden centre. You are invited to enter, to move about freely as in a museum and in this way encounter texts again and again: monologues, short plays, excerpts from plays.

C is alone, not only physically but emotionally, too. Apparently, his only way of making contact with the outside world is via the phone. But whom should you call when you have no one? Well, what could be more uplifting than a phone conversation with a dubious customer service hotline? Or how about finally getting back at the senders of all those annoying spam mails and calling them all around the world?

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 “THE EICHMANN PROJECT” by Liat Fassberg revisits one of the seminal events in the history of Israel – the Eichmann trial. The upheavals of the current time of systematic collapse, reminding us of Hannah Arendt’s warning about the dangers of obedience without criticism or thought, are examined. 

Dates and times:

In Graz:

• Friday 11 June, 20:00 - 22:00

Online:

• Friday 11 June, 20:00 - 22:00

A colourful evening featuring three very dissimilar superstars, united by their love of refined entertainment. Denice Bourbon, the rising, gay star on the stand-up firmament, Christiane Rösinger, legendary Berlin songwriter and galaist and Stefanie Sargnagel, iconic poet from Vienna’s outskirts, together on one stage for the first time. 

In 2002 Nico Boon found an album of photographs at a jumble sale. A woman covers her murdered children. A North Korean soldier holds the hacked-off head of an enemy soldier high in the air. 

In his award-winning play, the British author outlines an undemocratic experimental arrangement: In a near future, a law is introduced that limits communication to 140 words per day and person. “Zitronen Zitronen Zitronen” tells the love story between Bernadette and Olivia and allows the author to explore the personal and political consequences of an infringement of the basic right to free speech.

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