An annual showcase of contemporary Central and Eastern European theater, honoring Vaclav Havel. Theater, puppetry, clown, music, opera on film, a livestream from Salzburg, and more.
Staged reading of a comic thriller that mixes wall street-style misdeeds with mafia-style consequences, based on the real Estonian banking scandal in which Russian oligarchs used Estonian banks to launder their money into the EU.
Excerpts from Czech plays that use Vaclav Havel's character, Vanek, originally created as a stand-in for himself (a dissident playwright) during the Communist era in the former Czechoslovakia. The character was then adapted by numerous other Czech dissident playwrights, such as Pavel Landovsky and Pavel Kohout.
Staged reading of a contemporary tragicomedy, a paraphrase of the biblical brothers Cain and Abel, which tells a story of love, friendship and the hatred of otherness fueled by the far-right National Socialists.
Staged reading of a contemporary play dealing with the current war in Ukraine. A story about a Ukrainian family on a farm and a Russian soldier who stumbles into their farm.
Lowlands is a haunting depiction of the moral decomposition of the terminal years of communism seen through the eyes of a child from the German minority of Romania. It is based on a text by the Nobel Prize winning writer Herta Muller.
A daughter’s relationship with her father is always special, but how does it change if the father is a famous dictator? How does it feel when Dad is a “monster”? Here Moscow Calling dynamites the idea of unique truth and proposes to the audience an intense theatrical-cinematic experience.
A puppetry workshop led by Marta Hermannova and company members of The Zlin Project centered on their process of creating The Zlin Project – a puppet production about the life of the city of Zlin in the era of Tomas Bata.
More than a decade ago, the right-wing extremist terrorist cell known as NSU came across the novel The Turner Diaries by American neo-Nazi William L. Pierce. This work served as a guide for other neo-Nazis world-wide. Playing Earl Turner combines documentary material with fictional literature and creates a disturbing scenario that fundamentally questions the common notion of lone perpetrators.
A thrilling and gut-wrenching play that charts the relationship between Carla and her young charge, Helver. Helver is fascinated by fascism – not by the ideology, which he is unable to grasp, but by the bravura of the movement.
Filmed during early Covid in a vast, empty building, with 20 performers in permanent motion, Effemera is about fleeting moments. Commander is inspired by real online chats of the neo-Nazi group FKD, led by a thirteen-year-old boy operating under the nickname Commander.
Riders views human action through the eyes of birds. Of the ancient inhabitants of our planet, sentient, intelligent, free beings, shrouded in mythology. Of the silent observers of our destinies.
Based on a dark comedy written in the Terezín Ghetto in 1944 by camp inmate Karel Svenk but banned on the night of its dress rehearsal for fear of SS reprisals. The play the actors are rehearsing in the film pits bike riders (Jews) against lunatics (Nazis), as did the absurdist original—a silly story with a deeply serious message.
A new project by Yara Arts Group that captures the resilience of Ukrainians in a multi-media performance about Russia’s full- scale invasion of the city.
Noon combines documentary and physical theatre that tells about the events which followed after the demonstration of eight people in Red Square on August 25, 1968.
In Boa, choreographer Paweł Sakowicz wonders about paths by which desire circulates in the body; how it is created through a spatial orientation of bodies; how it can be intermediated through popular culture, discourses, and technologies.
Ballet dancers are said to believe they can fly. And indeed, suspended for a second in a jump, they do.
A young woman born in independent, post-occupation Estonia sings of the Soviet residue that pollutes the minds of some of her fellow countrymen and restrains feminist progress.
Inspired by the life of the successful athlete Zdena Koubkova, celebrated in the sports world of the time as a “wonder woman” and holding several world records until she was identified as intersex – in 1936, changed her gender, and underwent surgery to become Zdeněk Koubek.
Markus Hirnigel will read and perform, in a music hall vein, two short stories by Franz Kafka, adapted for the stage in honor of the 100th anniversary Kafka’s death.
Stage reading of a play that has the intonation of contemporary absurdism. The heroine finds herself in someone else’s apartment and doesn’t remember how she got there. Strange sounds out of nowhere, overly friendly hosts and uncomfortable silence.
A biting commentary on a Hungarian society marked by hatred, recrimination, and ultimately sorrow.
The threads of the past and present collide and interweave as four friends and their families take radically different paths in an effort to give themselves new lives after the dissolution of their home country.
Set in Ceausescu's Romania, Lowlands is both a memory play and surrealist vision animated from a child's perspective. It is with awe and love that we call on community to gather around this version of Herta Müller’s text on its 40th anniversary of a first publication. Together with her words we will celebrate the divine resistance that girls carry in their soul the world over for all of us.
Join a group of theater buffs for the matinee show of The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the First World War at the Theatre for the New City and an after-show meet up.
A staged reading of four translations of Scene 8 in Vaclav Havel’s play, The Memo (also translated as the Memorandum). An examination of the nuances of translation. Followed by a discussion with the translators.
The story of the Roma girl who discovers at a very young age the differences of race, color and environment, but who manages to make her way through life and transform her complexes into determination and motivation, has the power of a therapeutic exercise.
A collaborative fusion of performance, visual art, and documentary that explores the male gaze, self-objectification, and the way power shifts as we move between looking, seeing, and being seen.
A dance performance as a form of somatic protest and viscous disobedience in the light of the current aggression of the Russian government.
A hallucination, a dream, a life, a performance: conjectures and reflections on temporal efforts and their significance. What holds? What resists the bite of time? An interdisciplinary performance examining human ambition, embodied presence, and existential meaning.
A tender exploration of a relationship between a father and his son. Through a series of monologues offering advice to his son, a Czechoslovakian refugee of the 1968 Prague Spring inadvertently traces the consequences of this historical event on his life, values, and personal relationships.
