Balance of the Festival Theaterformen 2022

The Festival Theaterformen 2022 is over and we look back on eleven exciting and eventful days. A total of 150 artists* from 12 countries traveled to Braunschweig for the festival for a "meeting of art and audience in a better world". The approximately 50 different events consisting of theater and dance works, performances, talks, art installations and parties, which we showed and celebrated in the houses of the Staatstheater Braunschweig, in the LOT-Theater and in the Festival Center on the Herzogin-Anna-Amalia-Platz, were attended by around 5,000 visitors.  

Anna Mülter is pleased with how the first Braunschweig festival edition under her direction went:
"Together with the Braunschweig audience and the international artists who traveled there, we finally celebrated theater in all its forms together again. With great joy and openness, the audience let itself be carried away and challenged. With the festival center on Herzogin-Anna-Amalia-Platz, we brought the festival right into the city. Whether at lunchtime or at the Silent Disco: it was as if the people of Braunschweig had been waiting for such an offer at this location for a long time."

The festival center, conceived and constructed by The DisOrdinary Architecture, has been very well received by the audience, artists* and passers-by. The temporary structure on Herzogin-Anna-Amalia-Platz behind the Kleines Haus invited visitors to linger with a bar offering food and drinks, a dance floor for the Silent Discos, and art installations
The design derived from deaf culture and sign language: the circular arrangements created when deaf people gather became a large clearing in the design, opening the space to the diversity of people and their realities of life. With large stickers on the floor, on which slogans of disabled activists were written (for example "Disability is not a bad word"), we also pointed out the structural conditions of the square, which make it difficult for people with baby carriages, wheelchairs or long canes to cross the square every day.

The festival center was enriched by two art installations by Indigenous artists: 
Baniwa Botany by Denilson Baniwa combined the idea of botany and metamorphosis through traditional Baniwa drawings of flowers, animals and plants in different stages of life. Every evening after sunset, projections of these drawings were beamed onto the façade of the Kleines Haus.
I am a Tree! by Naine Terena documented the plant world in a visual way. The central motifs were trees and shrubs in South Africa, Brazil and the Prinz-Albrecht-Park in Braunschweig. Using image processing programs, a photographic essay was created, which was exhibited on various materials and could be seen in the windows of the Kleines Haus throughout the festival.

With A GATHERING IN A BETTER WORLD, the Festival Theaterformen invited the artists Jess Thom / Touretteshero, Edu O. and Alexandrina Hemsley / Yewande 103 from July 7 to 10 as part of an international project of the Goethe-Institut to make the expertise of people with disabilities visible and to focus on their perspectives with a diverse exchange and performance program. For four days, the artists took over three floors of the Großes Haus and opened it to audiences of all ages.
A GATHERING IN A BETTER WOLRD is a cooperation with the Goethe-Institut: The opening Gathering in Braunschweig will be followed by others in Johannesburg, Montevideo, Shanghai and Kyoto in the coming months. 

The co-production with the JUNGES! Staatstheater Braunschweig, the dance piece "SAWTIK. Deine Stimme" by Moroccan choreographer Taoufiq Izeddiou, returns in the fall and enters the repertoire of the Staatstheater.


Festival Theaterformen 2023 will take place in Hanover from June 22 to July 2.