German theater company returns to China with two productions

After its successful premiere in China last year, Theatertreffen in China will come to China again from June 7 to July 8. The program is jointly presented by Berliner Theatertreffen, one of the most important cultural forces in German-speaking countries, and Wu Promotion, a private Chinese events-promotion agency for the performing arts.

Two Berliner Theatertreffen productions will be staged this year in Beijing's Tianqiao Performing Arts Center: director Hans Werner Kroesingers' production Tripping Stones State Theater and director Herbert Fritsch's Der Die Mann.

"I was very pleased to find the Chinese audience so interested in the German theater scene. With different aesthetics and topics, I was delighted to see that so many people came to watch our productions. This made us realize the importance of an international exchange and dialogue about what concerns our people and what is important in the arts even more," says Thomas Oberender, artistic director of the Berliner Festspiele, an arts center that is the parent organization of Berliner Festspiele.

In 2015, Wu Promotion launched a five-year partnership with Berliner Theatertreffen to bring productions from the famous theater festival to China from 2016 to 2020.

Oberender, who has been with Berliner Festspiele since 2012, says the backbone of the festival always is the choosing of the 10 most remarkable German, Swiss and Austrian productions of the year. This choice is made by a jury of professional critics.

For Theatertreffen in China, a jury of theater experts from both China and Germany selects two or three productions from the 10 performances staged in Berlin to present them in China the following year.

When Berliner Theatertreffen came to China for the first time in 2016, more than 9,300 people watched the performances of the three plays, namely Deutsches Theater Berlin's version of Waiting for Godot, Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin's Common Ground and Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg's John Gabriel Borkman. More than 4,700 people took part in accompanying programs, such as talks and workshops.

Jury member Clemens Treter, director of the Goethe Institute in China, says: "When selecting the performances we have several aims in mind. On the one hand, we look for plays that are aesthetically and by content accessible for a Chinese audience. On the other hand, we would also like to present the broad range of theater productions that exist in the German speaking area".

The other juries for this year's Theatertreffen in China also include Meng Jinghui, a renowned director in China; Daniel Richter, a co-director of the Theatertreffen; and Yu Rongjun, deputy general manager of the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center.

Regarding the two productions to be staged in China, Treter notes that Der Die Mann, based on texts by the late Austrian writer and poet Konrad Bayer, is a stimulating feast of sound, color, images, wordplay and dramatic performance from the famous theater, Berlin Volksb��hne. Tripping Stones State Theatre represents the finest of German documentary theater, taking a close look at the history of one German theater house, the Badisches Staatsschauspiel in Karlsruhe. Both productions have toured not only in Germany, but also internationally.

"It is my vision that this platform will be expanded and developed. We show theater not only in its excellency, but also in its experiment. In short, my vision is to reveal a glimpse of the future of theater, to instigate all the players on the field, next to showing the best of what German theater has to offer today," says artistic director Oberender.

(China Daily 05/27/2017 page17)