Isabell Antonia Höckel

In poetic images and with moving music, the ensemble of actors, dancers and singers tell a drama about the unfulfilled love of Hans Christian Andersen's unfulfilled love and how the famous fairy tale writer fairy tale poet merges with one of his most famous characters, the the little mermaid. Andersen's escape from reality becomes a touching, visually stunning theatre event.

For Achen, a young woman from Uganda, the invitation to a seminar on women's health at Johns Hopkins University in the USA is a long-awaited opportunity for a fresh start. During the seminar, she meets Kat, a white American and highly committed intern in the institute's health program, who wants nothing more than to travel to Achen's home country and help out there. At the end of the seminar, Kat is supposed to take the Ugandan participant to the airport for her journey home, but Achen has disappeared. Years will pass before the two women's paths cross again - with serious consequences. In «The Promised Land», Asiimwe Deborah Kawe tells of the lives of two women, of their hopes, disappointments, inner and outer struggles, and shows the gulf that exists between people with and without passports.

Imagine that you haven’t been born yet. And imagine too that your whole life so far is unimportant. Just like all the opportunities you might have missed or bad decisions you might have made. Leave it all behind you. In «Now or Never» we are going to make a completely fresh start!

«Peer, you’re lying!»: Henrik Ibsen immediately highlights the key theme of his dramatic poem  in its opening line – the blurred boundary between illusion and reality. Because Peer, whose youth is shaped by the poverty of his farming background, continually reinvents himself with the aid of stories, lies and the arts of fabulation – as a cosmopolitan, a colonial master and even an Emperor.

Austrian playwright Ewald Palmetshofer translates Shakespeare's royal drama «King Henry IV» into the present day of eroding democracies with sophisticated language and defiant humour.

In his historical miniatures, Stefan Zweig brings together brilliant achievements in European history that tell of unbreakable vitality as well as human weaknesses. In Thom Luz' poetic and musical production, they become archive material that is explored, sung about, brought to life in brief moments and also set in relation to Stefan Zweig's own biography and his journey into exile in Brazil.

In her new work, the director Claudia Bauer, who has been invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen four times and is renowned for her work with fast and furious acting ensembles, now tackles someone who typifies Munich, the brilliant comedian Karl Valentin. In her usual, opulent stage language she will devise a homage to the Bavarian whose anarchic approach to language led the critic Alfred Kerr to invent the term «Wortzerklauberer», someone who steals words and tears them to pieces.