Today is the last day of the Theaterformen festival and with an attendance rate of 83 percent and around 10,000 guests it can be deemed a great success. Fifteen performances from eleven countries were shown, including ten German premieres. The directors came from Africa and Europe, from North and South America. There were a total of around one hundred events in the eleven-day programme, including pre-show discussions, panel discussions, workshops and live concerts in the festival centre, along with the international shows. The festival attracted an enthusiastic audience from the region and beyond, as well as international visitors from the theatre sector.

Martine Dennewald, who this year curated her third festival, takes stock: “Theaterformen 2017 exclusively invited shows by female directors, choreographers or collectives that consist of at least half female artists. It was an attempt to balance out the structural inequality in this edition of the festival, not in the sense of ‘fair’ division or a quota, but rather to completely reverse it as a slightly subversive gesture, and it had a double effect: firstly, because the hidden curatorial principle was only noticed by very few people; this disproves the theory that there is a specific women’s aesthetic or set of themes, and it speaks for the self-evident strong presence of female directors and choreographers in an international context. On the other hand, because there were discussions about women’s situation in the theatre after the festival; the festival has therefore lived up to its role of giving a wide spectrum of artistic positions a voice and presenting theatre pieces to the Hannover public and the guests from abroad that should have gotten more attention a long time ago.”

Participatory formats very popular with the public
Along with shows that addressed political and socially relevant issues like Tristesses, Mare Nostrum, De-Apart-Hate and Portrait of Myself as My Father, plays the audience could participate in like The Fever and the productions developed in and for Hannover, Oratorium and Dein Wort in meinem Mund, were very popular with the audience. In the production by Anna Rispoli, Lotte Lindner & Till Steinbrenner, the audience slipped into the skin of strangers and had conversations about love in unusual locations such as a sauna in Ihme-Zentrum, the nudist villa in Bornum, the Sparkasse bank at Raschplatz and a changing room in the TUI Arena. The audience of Walk, Hands, Eyes (Hannover) by Parisian artist Myriam Lefkowitz were particularly moved. For this walk through the city of Hannover, in which the participant keeps their eyes closed, Lefkowitz worked with refugees before the festival and trained them as guides for her one-to-one performance.

Donations for suspended tickets
Thanks to donations, almost one hundred refugees had the opportunity to visit theatre performances of their choice. For the first time in Hannover, this year Theaterformen festival offered suspended tickets for refugees. The discounted tickets were collected in donation boxes at the Staatstheater Hannover’s box office and then passed on to refugees in cooperation with the Hannover organisation, kargah e.V.  

The pick of the best: blog.theaterformen.de
In this edition of the festival, the premieres were also celebrated on the multi-lingual blog.theaterformen.de; journalists who have fled their home countries and students blogged in creative text, photo, audio and video formats about the day-to-day events of the festival. Sound bites from the audience alternated with reviews of the plays, and audio interviews with the artists with recordings of concerts. The blog was published in Arabic, German, English, French, Tigrinya and Farsi. It was all led by Jacqueline Moschkau and is a cooperation with Refugees on Air Radio Leinhertz. The blog is still online.   

The next festival will take place between the 7th and 17th of June 2018 in Braunschweig.