Diskothek

In November 2017, a new venue for the Diskothek will be launched on the ground floor of the Schauspielhaus. A venue that continues to be dedicated exclusively to contemporary drama: A space for reflecting on the present, a laboratory for new writing, a room of opportunities for dramatists.
Along with the new building, we will also establish some new programmatic accents: While the Diskothek’s focus so far has been on world premieres of German-language plays, we will now expand the spectrum to include new formats of work and encounters, plays that have already been produced but warrant another look as well as new voices in contemporary drama from Europe and the world.

The Diskothek’s programme concept starts with the perspective of theatre authors. They are and want to be involved in the venue’s production processes in a variety of ways. Different formats will account for these varying creative processes: Author David Lindemann will develop a play with and for a company of grown-up and young actors; Heinz Helle will dramatise one of his own novels for Schauspiel Leipzig in close exchange with director Daniel Foerster, and Sascha Hargesheimer will write a play for associate director Claudia Bauer, working on a thematic complex that they developed together. There will also be productions of previously completed texts: “Wolferwartungsland” and “Lebendfallen” are debut plays of young authors Florian Wacker and Enis Maci respectively, and the German premiere of “Prinzessin Hamlet” is a feminist Shakespeare overwriting by Finnish author E.L. Karhu, whose work experiments with a new stage vocabulary.

 The Diskothek’s programme establishes long-term relationships with authors and their works. Only too often are plays only produced once domestically and perhaps once more in neighbouring countries, never to be seen again on the programmes of other theatres. This is not so much a symptom of the sometimes stipulated insignificant half-life of contemporary drama. It is rather due to the politics of attention prevailing in our theatre landscape, which means that authors are under enormous pressure to keep producing new plays that can be marketed as world premieres. The Diskothek will remain a platform for world premieres of young authors. But at the same time, it will provide sustainable support for authors by being a venue for second, third or fourth new productions, created by exciting directors. This season, for instance, one of Mexico’s most important theatre makers, Alberto Villareal, will make his German directing debut with a production of “paradies fluten” by the young Austrian author Thomas Köck.