Productions to showcase variety of German theater offerings

[Photo provided to China Daily]

Thomas Oberender, artistic director of the Berliner Festspiele, an arts center that brings together a variety of arts and culture events under one roof each year in the German capital, made his first trip to China in 2014, and he says the visit was beyond his expectations.

He went to Wuzhen, a small town in Zhejiang province, which is about a two-hour drive from Shanghai, to attend the Wuzhen Theater Festival, a 10-day event showcasing international theater works and original Chinese dramas from young talents.

Impressed by the old houses and warehouses, which were renovated and turned into performance venues, Oberender was also surprised to see how Chinese audiences embraced the theater works and how passionate the young Chinese theater talents were.

Six months later, Oberender was invited by Wu Promotion, a private Chinese event promotion agency for the performing arts, to bring the Berliner Theatertreffen, one of the festivals under Berliner Festspiele, to China.

Oberender was excited and agreed.

In 2015, Wu Promotion reached a five-year partnership agreement with Berliner Theatertreffen to bring productions from the famous theater festival to China from 2016 to 2020.

From June 20 to July 9 this year, three selected Theatertreffen productions are being staged for the first time in Beijing and Shanghai.

The productions are Deutsches Theater Berlin's version of Waiting for Godot, Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin's Common Ground and Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg's John Gabriel Borkman.

"Personally, I am very interested in Chinese culture, especially after I visited Wuzhen and learned how alive the Chinese theater scene is," Oberender said during his recent visit to Beijing. "We take this opportunity not just to stage theater works from Germany but also to communicate with Chinese audiences and Chinese theater talent."

According to Oberender, who has been working at Berliner Festspiele since 2012, the three works being staged in China deal with problems such as the economic crisis, the migrant crisis and the refugee crisis.

"With globalization and urbanization, these issues exist not just in Europe but worldwide. Like many places in the world, Berlin as a diverse European metropolis is experiencing a social transition. We have many diverse cultures joining in, which inevitably causes severe social and cultural conflicts in our societies," he says.