Director Thomas Ostermeier, at the head of the Schaubühne in Berlin, one of Germany’s leading theatre institutions, since 1999, is the winner of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement of the 41st International Theatre Festival (Venice, 10 > 16 October 2011). Rimini Protokoll, the artistic collective based in Berlin, has been awarded the Silver Lion, established last year to honour new theatrical realities.

 

Both awards – which recognize Thomas Ostermeier and Rimini Protokoll as representative of the renewal of the dramatic arts and Berlin as one of the most vital capitals of European theatre – were recommended by the Director of the Festival, Àlex Rigola and accepted by the Board of Directors of the Biennale di Venezia chaired by Paolo Baratta. The awards ceremony for the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement will take place on the day of the inauguration of the 41st International Theatre Festival, Monday 10 October at 3:30 p.m. in Venice, in the Sala delle Colonne at Ca’ Giustinian, the headquarters of the Biennale (Awards ceremony by invitation, reservation obligatory at Tel. +39 041 2728 319 (Mon > Sat, 3-7 pm) e-mail teatro41@labiennale.org).

In the past, the award for lifetime achievement in Theatre has been given to Ferruccio Soleri (2006), Ariane Mnouchkine (2007), Roger Assaf (2008) and Irene Papas (2009).

 

His brilliant career, which began in 1996, has made Thomas Ostermeier “an international point of reference for the reinterpretation of the classics in theatre and the staging of new contemporary drama – the motivation reads. As a director, conscious and respectful of the actors’ importance, Ostermeier has joined with his actors and actresses to bring forth an extraordinary interpretative effort, whose primary characteristic is its ability to combine scenic truth and artifice. Ostermeier is a director who has always been successful in combining popularity with quality, but above all he is an artist in constant search of the new forms of communication continuously required by the fleeting art of theatre”.

 

Thomas Ostermeier made his controversial Italian debut at the Theatre Biennale in 1999 with Shopping and Fucking by Mark Ravenhill, introducing himself as the director-advocate of new playwriting – the post-Thatcher work of Sarah Kane, Enda Walsh and Ravenhill – with its adrenalin-filled mise-en-scènes, which burst with explosive physical energy. Today Ostermeier takes on the great classics of the theatre, such as Ibsen and Shakespeare, with stage productions that never lack his scathing touch. As in Hamlet, which will inaugurate the 41st Theatre Festival and bring Ostermeier back to the Biennale, engaging him as well in a workshop for actors on the theme of the seven deadly sins, along with six other masters of contemporary theatre.

 

As regards Rimini Protokoll, the Biennale di Venezia honours a leading company in new contemporary playwriting: Stefan Kaegi, stage director and among the artistic directors of the company, together with his partners Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel - have made the dokumentarstück, what we might call docu-drama, their mark of distinction. According to the motivation, “the company’s work has always been accompanied by experimentation and by reflection on the real problems of the world and in particular on the problems related to globalization”.

 

An exponent of post-dramatic theatre, as it was initially characterized in Germany before the fitting definition spread, the artistic collective founded by Stefan Kaegi together with Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel burst onto the international scene at the dawn of the new millennium with theatre “actions” that had a powerful impact, whose purpose was to surprise and spur reflection by subverting the basic rules of doing theatre. Rejecting the “story” in favour of an investigation into reality by carrying entire pieces of real life onto the stage with its actual protagonists, “experts in everyday life”, in place of actors; or focusing on the spectator with his choices, or even moving the stage to atypical locations, such as lorries, town squares or others, creating situations on the border between performance and social investigation, fiction and reality, art and news reporting. Like when Rimini Protokoll gathered 100 people from Berlin onto the stage of the Hebbel Theater, transforming the annual stockholders’ meeting of Daimler AG at the Convention Centre in Berlin into a theatre ready-made, buying enough shares to allow 200 spectators to participate in the event.

 

The author of real “urban interventions”, Kaegi will bring his latest work, Bodenprobe Kasakhstan, to Venice and to the 41st International Theatre Festival, in a “production” that talks about oil, Kazakhstan, returning Russian-German immigrants and about us; but he will also lead a workshop about theatre and new technologies as Rimini Protokoll has developed them recently in a production for the National Theatre of Wales, Video Walking Venice, in which the participants will be equipped with an iPod touch, a multi-media player that can record high-definition images, producing a final result that will first be experienced with the audience.

Thomas Ostermeier (Soltau – Germany, 1968)

He studied directing at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst “Ernst Busch” in Berlin (1992-96). Following his early experiences in directing (Die Unbekannte by Alexander Blok in 1995 and Recherche Faust/Artaud at the bat-Studiotheater Berlin in 1996), Ostermeier became the Art Director of the Baracke at the Deutsches Theatre in Berlin (1996/99), where he produced Fat Men in Skirts by Nicky Silver (1996), Knives in Hens by David Harrower, which won the Friedrich-Luft-Prize, Mann ist Mann by Brecht, Suzuki by Alexej Schipenko, Shopping and Fucking by Mark Ravenhill, with which he made his debut in Italy and at the Biennale, and Disco Pigs by Enda Walsh. In 1998 the Baracke was named “Theatre of the Year”.

Since September 1999 Ostermeier has been the resident director and a member of the Artistic Direction of the Schaubühne. He also directed several productions at the Münchner Kammerspiele: Der starke Stamm by Marieluise Fleißer, Vor Sonnenaufgang by Gerhart Hauptmann, Die Ehe der Maria Braun by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Susn by Herbert Achternbusch. For the Edinburgh Festival, he directed The Girl on the Sofa by Jon Fosse (which won the Herald Angel Award), and staged The Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen at the Burgtheater in Vienna. In 2002, Ostermeier was appointed “artiste associé” at the Festival d’Avignon by the new artistic director of the festival, Vincent Baudriller.

In 2003 Nora was awarded the Nestroy Prize and the Politika Prize at the BITEF theatre festival in Belgrade. His productions of John Gabriel Borkmann and Hamlet won international recognition (2009): the former won the Grand Prix de la Critique of France and the latter was awarded the Barcelona Critics Prize. This year The Cut won the critic’s award at the KONTAKT international theatre festival in Torun (Poland).

In 2009 he was appointed Officier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. Last May, Ostermeier was announced as President of the Deutsch-Französischer Kulturrat (DKFR), the German-French Council of Culture.