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Die Bairishe Geisha Munich
The group Die Bairishe Geisha brought new color to the freelance theater scene in Munich in 1998: Judith Huber, Marianne Kirch and Eva Löbau enrich the local culture with the tasks and working conditions of geishas. Die Bairishe Geisha´s "Makiju" is a long-term cross-over project with the goal of establishing the geisha as an urban mythical figure in the collective memory of the city of Munich. Makiju appeared on the scene for the first time in 1998 with the literature project "Geisha Mail." In 2000 they created their first performance piece, "Mein Gastmahl" ("My Banquet"). Since then, the ensemble has been developing several theater performances with different casts; the performances were shown at, among others venues, the Münchner Kammerspiele, the Münchner Volkstheater and Kampnagel in Hamburg.
Marie Brassard Canada
Marie Brassard studied at the Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique in Quebec, and she worked for many years with the director Robert Lepage. She wrote and adapted texts for the stage and played the lead role in his most important works: "Polygraphe"; "Les Sept Branches de la Rivière Ota"; and "La Géometrie des Miracles." She played Lady Macbeth, Ariel and Virgilia in his Shakespeare cycle. She performed in the productions of "Asile" by Dominique Champagne and Oreille, and "Tigre et Bruit" by Alexis Martin. She enjoyed an immense success at the SPIELART 2001 festival with the first piece she produced herself, "Jimmy, Dream Figure."
In 2005 she was a guest performer at SPIELART with "Peepshow," a breathtaking kaleidoscope of intimate stories about temptations, flirts and broken hearts.
Romeo Castellucci/ Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio Italy
Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio was founded in 1981 in Cesena and was named after the famous painter and architect of the High Renaissance, Raffaello Santi, who is better known as Raphael. Since then, this theater group led by Romeo Castellucci has been one of the most radical representatives of "nuovo teatro" in Italy. Starting with iconoclastic theater (iconoclasm: image breaking; opposing and destroying icons), the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio has developed its own theatrical language over the course of twenty years working in theater. The group attracted worldwide attention during recent years in particular with their contemporary adaptations of classical material and their richness of images. Romeo Castellucci has been considered to be a trailblazer of avant-garde theater in Italy since the early 1990s. He was the director of the Theater Biennale in Venice in 2005.
Charlotte Engelkes Sweden
Charlotte Engelkes, born in Stockholm, worked from 1987 to 1996 with Michael Laub/ Remote Control. She was a guest performer at the SPIELART Theater Festival in 1995 with her first solo piece, "The Solo" (directed by Michael Laub) in the Werkraum theater. Since 1997 she has developed different projects with, among others, the author and choreograph Raimand Hoghe, the composer Heiner Goebbels, the musicians Marie Goyette and Yumiko Tanaka, as well as with the director Ong Ken Sen. Sasha Waltz hired her for the piece "Inside-Out." Since 2000 she has been a member of the ensemble of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, where she celebrated a success with, among other productions, her adaptation of Strindberg entitled "Miss Julie - The Musical."
Rodrigo García / La Carnicería Teatro Spain
The author and director Rodrigo García, born and raised in an Argentine slum on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, lives and works in Madrid with his group La Carnicería Teatro, which translates as "The Slaughterhouse Theater." As an author and director he has received many awards, and he has dedicated himself to an experimental theater without any compromises, which searches for a personal, unmistakable theater language far beyond the established forms. His productions rely on the speechlessness of the modern consumer, and on the consumer´s function as an applicant and a user, and García imitates this with black humor and grotesque ideas.
Anders Härm Estonia
Anders Härm studied art history and semiotics at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn, and he has been a lecturer there since 2000. Since 2002 he has been a curator at the Kunsthalle Tallinn. His first performance, "Be drunk, be very, very drunk," was created more or less by accident at a conference of art historians, when, instead of delivering a complicated scientific speech, he gave a speech on being drunk while being quite tipsy, and this performance caused quite an sensation at different festivals later on. He founded "troubleproductions" with the Estonian performance artist Hanno Soans in 2001 and realized numerous art projects and performances. He curated the Estonian pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale.
His latest production is entitled "Cooking and Shitting." It is a combination of lecture and performance, and he conceived it especially for the Balthoscandal theater festival.
Pol Heyvaert / Victoria Belgium
The director, dramatic advisor and Designer Pol Heyvaert has been working since 1995 at the international production center Victoria in Ghent with different artists, e.g., with Alain Platel as a stage designer ("Moeder en Kind").
The origins of Victoria can be found in the company "Stekelbees," which was founded in Ghent in 1975. In 1987 it was renamed "Oud Huis Stekelbees" while Guy Cassiers was its director (today he is the director of "Het Toneelhuis" in Antwerp). Victoria was created when Dirk Pauwels took over in 1992.
hornroh Switzerland
Behind the name "hornroh" are the instrument builder and Alphorn virtuoso Balthasar Streiff and the sinfonietta musicians Heléne Berglund, Rudolf Linder and Martin Roos. Martin Roos grew up in Sarnen, Switzerland, and he "imbibed as an infant" how to play the Alphorn - or so his colleagues say. Heléne Berglund is a soloist on the tuba. She has been living in Basel since 1997 and has been playing with hornroh since 2003. Born in Sweden, playing the Alphorn is a special challenge to her. Rudolf Linder founded the ensemble "basel sinfonietta" in 1980, and he also plays trumpet in the ensemble. Balthasar Streiff studied jazz and art in Luzerne and Basel, and for years now he has been tackling the Alphorn both as a musical instrument and as a cult object. In 1996 he founded the project stimmhorn together with the voice artist Christian Zehnder. Stimmhorn has received several national and international awards.
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Grzegorz Jarzyna/ TR Warszawa Poland
Grzegorz Jarzyna, born in 1968 in the city of Chorzów in Upper Silesia, became an overnight star in the Polish theater scene with his debut as a director, "Tropenkoller," based on two pieces by Stanislaw Witkiewicz. In a very short period he received every important theater prize in Poland, and by 1998 he had been offered the position as artistic director of the renowned Teatr Rozmaitości in Warsaw. As the representative of the young generation of Polish artists who do not have to work anymore with innuendos and ambiguities to get past the censors, Jarzyna´s theater language is distinguished by clarity, directness and an almost magical intensity. The unfathomable films of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino have equally influenced his productions.
Saskia Kästner Berlin
Saskia Kästner was born in 1966 in Karlsruhe. After studying to be a business correspondent, she studied acting and phonetics. She worked as an actor at, among other theaters, Ohnsorg Theater in Hamburg, Kampnagel in Hamburg, Tacheles in Berlin, and Zeisehallen in Hamburg. She is an announcer at FAZ Business Radio Berlin, Deutsche Welle, Deutschlandradio Kultur, WDR, and she records audio books. Her solo programs include "Sister Cordula Reads Dime Novels About Doctors," a comedy reading; "Mrs. Krause / The Disaster in Baden"; "Walking Act"; and she performs stand-up comedy at trade fairs and shows.
Kinkaleri Italy
Kinkaleri was founded in 1995 as a group dedicated to "experimenting with formats and possibilities." The work of the internationally active artists Matteo Bambi, Luca Camilletti, Massimo Conti, Marco Mazzoni, Gina Monaco, and Cristina Rizzo oscillates between experimental theater, visual research, installation and performance. In 2002 the "Patologo edition" awarded Kinkaleri with the prize for "Best Dance / Theater Production of the Year" for their production of.
2003 saw the creation of the work "Tono" - an acoustic-dynamic experiment with two dancers and a DJ - and also the video project "West." The piece "I Cenci/Spettacolo" followed one year later.
Christoph Marthaler/ Schauspielhaus Zürich Switzerland
Christoph Marthaler s musical-theatrical collages have left their mark on the German-language theater scene since the 1990s. Subtle slapstick, song and a strong rhythmization in the works are the characteristics of Marthalers style. Born in 1951 in Erlenbach (near Zurich), he studied music in Zurich and studied pantomime with Jacques Lecoq in Paris. In the seventies and eighties he was a theater musician at various German-language theaters, and he produced his first small music theater projects in Switzerland. Frank Baumbauer hired him in 1989 at Theater Basel, where he performed his first lieder recitals and productions. It was here that he met the stage designer Anna Viebrock and the dramatic adviser Stefanie Carp, and ever since they have been a production team. From 2000 to 2004 he was the director of Zürcher Schauspielhaus. His final production there was "O.T. Eine Ersatzpassion" ("O.T. - A Substitute Passion").
Rick Miller & Daniel Brooks Canada
Based in Toronto, the Necessary Angel Theatre Company was founded in 1978 by Richard Rose. Since then, the company has developed and produced 40 plays. In November 2003, the director, author and actor Daniel Brooks became the artistic director of the company.
Rick Miller is an architect, actor and singer, and he performs in three languages on four continents. He is considered to be one of the best performers in Canada, and his repertoire ranges from classical to avant-garde theater, from musicals to comedy, from synchronization to film and television. He was especially influenced by his work with Robert Lepage and Peter Gabriel.
Philine Velhagen und Barbara te Kock/ PATHOS transport theater Munich
Philine Velhagen studied theater, literature and comparative literature at the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich. She works as a freelance director in Cologne, Munich and Basel for Drama Köln, PATHOS transport theater and Raum 33, to name just a few. Barbara te Kock studied theater in Munich after working as a photographer´s assistant for Herlinde Koelbl. She works as a freelance dramatic adviser and director at, among other theaters, Pasinger Fabrik and PATHOS transport theater.
Philine Velhagen and Barbara te Kock have co-directed "Warum man im Kino weint and im Theater nicht" ("Why we cry in the cinema and not in the theater") (2003), and the pieces "Wie ich mich in einen Apfel zurückzog" ("How I withdrew inside an apple") (2004), "Judith and Euro" (2004), and "Verschwörung Kubelka" ("The Kubelka Conspiracy") (2005).
Julian Rosefeldt Germany
Julian Rosefeldt studied architecture in Munich and Barcelona, and he works as a freelance visual artist. Here is a selection of his solo exhibitions: Kunstsammlung, Düsseldorf; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Atlantis Space, London; Goethe Institutes, Paris; Porto; Sofia; Salvador de Bahia; Herzliya Museum of Art, Tel Aviv; Kunstwerke, Berlin. And here is a selection of his group exhibitions: Akademie der Künste and Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; Kunstmuseum, Düsseldorf; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Kunsthalle, Wien; Tate Gallery of Modern Art, London; Kunsthalle, Basel; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Columbia University and PS 1, New York. Rosefeldt took part as a video artist in the following productions: "Supermarket" by Biljana Srbljanovic and "Goldene Zeiten" ("Golden Times") by Richard Dresser (both directed by Thomas Ostermeier); "In the Jungle of the Cities" by Bertolt Brecht (directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna, 2003) and "Electronic City" by Falk Richter (directed by Tom Kühnel, 2004).
She She Pop Hamburg
She She Pop is a group of eight artists from Hamburg and Berlin, who studied theater in the city of Giessen. As of this writing they have done live performances, performed on stage as a band, produced and filmed several episodes of a soap opera and performed in public spaces. She She Pop is Johanna Freiburg, Fanni Halmburger, Lisa Lucassen, Mieke Matzke, Katharina Oberlik, Ilia Papatheodorou, Berit Stumpf and Sebastian Bark. When they announced their production "Trust" (1998), She She Pop called their group the "Spice Girls of post cultural theater." This theater collective hasnt been able to shake off this label since.
48nord Munich
In 1998 Siegfried Rössert and Ulrich Müller founded 48nord as an "open" ensemble; the ensemble performs in different formations as well as performing duo concerts. Ulrich Müller works in the areas of sound installations and performance, among other areas, and he has been part of numerous theater productions and has directed a series of radio plays. He is an author of radio plays in the area of electronic music, and he is also one of the trustees of "t-u-b-e" (The Gallery of Radiophone Art, Installations and Audio Performances / Munich). Siegfried Rössert played bass and sang in a number of bands (including Kevin Coyne and Engel wider Willen), and he also played in ensembles for ancient music. He composes for theater, film and radio play productions, and performs concerts with renowned artists (among others, George Lewis, New York; Barry Guy, London; Giancarlo Schiaffini, Rome; David Moss, New York) in Germany and abroad (to name a few venues: Centre for Contemporary Arts CCA Glasgow 2003; Gewandhaus Leipzig 2001; Philharmonie Köln 2000; Musikfest Hamburg 2000; Händelfestspiele Karlsruhe 1998).
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