Berlin Festival

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Big stage in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele
Side stage in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele

The Berliner Festspiele organize and realize a large number of independent festivals as well as exhibitions and individual events in the fields of music, theater, performance, dance, literature and visual arts all year round. The events mainly take place in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele , but also in many other places in the city. The Martin-Gropius-Bau has also been part of the Berlin Festival since 2001 . The exhibition house became known for archaeological and cultural-historical exhibitions, but also for exhibitions of modern art and photography.

The Berliner Festspiele mainly show art that functions internationally, intermedia, interdisciplinary and intercultural. Its formats are intended to create an overview and orientation as well as new connections between contemporary art, technological innovations and heterogeneous forms of work, discourse and experience. The annual calendar currently includes 12–15 exhibitions, four festivals and four national competitions for young people between 11 and 21 years of age. There are also cross-genre program series, education programs, international guest performances, special events, rentals and conferences.

The Berliner Festspiele with the Martin-Gropius-Bau are part of the cultural events of the federal government in Berlin GmbH and are funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media . Other business areas are the House of World Cultures and the Berlin International Film Festival .

Thomas Oberender has been director of the Berliner Festspiele since January 2012 .

Festivals and series of events

  • MaerzMusik - Festival for Time Issues (annually in March)
    MaerzMusik - Festival for Time Issues is an international festival for sound-related art forms. It is dedicated to the music of the present and the question of which particular forms of time perception enable current forms of music.
    MaerzMusik is the successor festival to the Berlin Music Biennale. The International Festival for Contemporary Music, founded in East Berlin in 1967, was continued from 1991 to 2001 by the Berliner Festspiele.
  • Theatertreffen Berlin (annually in May)
    The Theatertreffen is the most important industry festival for German-speaking theater. The tableau of ten “remarkable productions”, which are selected annually by an independent jury of critics from around 400 performances during the season, provides information about the status quo of German-language theater. Through the contextualization and strengthening of the stored formats Stückemarkt, International Forum, Theatertreffen-Blog as well as the mediation and discourse program, the festival has gained an overarching variety of perspectives and is now designed as an open space for all those interested in art as well as a network of theater arts.
    The Theatertreffen took place for the first time in 1964 as the “Berlin Theater Competition”.
  • Musikfest Berlin (every year at the beginning of September)
    The Musikfest Berlin is the international orchestra festival of the Berliner Festspiele, organized in cooperation with the Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation. It marks the beginning of the Berlin concert season in late summer. International orchestras, instrumental and vocal ensembles, together with the major symphony orchestras of the city of Berlin, present a festival program with changing thematic focuses.
    The Musikfest Berlin is the successor to the traditional Berliner Festwochen, which was founded in 1951.
  • Jazzfest Berlin (every year at the beginning of November)
    The Jazzfest Berlin was founded in 1964 as the Berlin Jazz Days and is one of Europe's oldest and most renowned jazz festivals. While the first two festival decades were dominated by the jazz greats from the United States, the spectrum has now expanded globally, with a focus on contemporary jazz of European provenance. The festival aims to offer up-and-coming artists a platform as well as to convey the ongoing vitality of the art form jazz.
  • Immersion (all year round)
    The Immersion program series, founded in 2016, develops a multi-year event concept between exhibition and performance, which is presented both in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele and in the Martin-Gropius-Bau . Forms of work are presented that the audience does not look at from the outside, but which they enter and which they experience and co-produce. The program series aims to create adventure zones between theater performances, discourse events and installations.
  • National competitions
    The national competitions of the Berliner Festspiele have been dedicated to promoting young talent in the fields of theater, literature, music and, since 2014, dance since the 1980s. They are funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and are aimed specifically at young participants:

Annual meetings include workshops, encounters and talks with writers, musicians, theater people, journalists and publishers.

History of the Berlin Festival

In 1951 the Berliner Festwochen and the International Film Festival took place for the first time in the western part of Berlin . In terms of cultural policy, conceived as a “showcase of the West” at the height of the Cold War , both festivals built a cultural bridge between East and West from the start.

In the following years they combined to form a complex of independent, closely related cultural events throughout the year, which from 1967 onwards were carried out as an organizational unit by the Berliner Festspiele GmbH founded for this purpose. In the first post-war decade, the Berliner Festwochen endeavored above all to familiarize the audience with the international developments in music and theater, from which National Socialist Germany had isolated itself from 1933 to 1945. In 1951 Marcel Marceau made his first guest appearance in Berlin, in 1952 George Balanchine came with the New York City Ballet and the Théâtre National Populaire Jean Vilars with Gérard Philipe and the then unknown Jeanne Moreau , in 1953 Giorgio Strehler with the Piccolo Teatro di Milano . The sensation of the 1955 festival was the guest performance of the opera Lucia di Lammermoor at La Scala in Milan with Herbert von Karajan and Maria Callas in the title role.

Classical music has always been the heart of the Berliner Festwochen. Numerous international concerts were held in cooperation with the Berlin broadcasting companies in cooperation with the Deutsche Oper Berlin , the Theater des Westens Berlin and the Berlin Philharmonic . A wide range of first-class orchestras, soloists and conductors (such as Wilhelm Furtwängler , Leonard Bernstein , Karl Böhm , Herbert von Karajan , Claudio Abbado , Daniel Barenboim and Sir Simon Rattle ) delighted the festival audience. The Berliner Festwochen was also a place for musical re-encounters - with Igor Stravinsky , who conducted Persephone and Oedipus Rex here in 1961 , and Vladimir Horowitz , who gave concerts in Germany for the first time in over 50 years in 1986.

In 1964, the Berliner Theatertreffen was founded under the name Berliner Theaterwerkstatt , which initially took place as part of the Berliner Festwochen, but later took place separately from them. In the same year, the Berlin Jazz Festival came into being as the Berlin Jazz Days, and from 1965 onwards also operated independently of the Festival Weeks.

In the years since its founding, the Berliner Festspiele have enabled the Berlin audience to encounter the work of Eugène Ionesco , Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee , with the theater work of Jean-Louis Barrault , Ingmar Bergman , Peter Brook , Patrice Chéreau , Tadeusz Kantor and Ariane Mnouchkine , Luca Ronconi , Robert Wilson and the choreographic work of Martha Graham , Pina Bausch , Merce Cunningham and William Forsythe . The program always reflected the spirit of the epoch, marked new beginnings and end times - the guest performance of the revolutionary Living Theater (1966), the premiere of Hans Werner Henze's Cimarron (1970) and George Tabori's Vietnam play Pinkville (1971) as well as the Chinese one Model play The Red Women's Battalion (1976), which was played during Mao Tse-tung's final days.

In the 1970s, the East-West conflict lost its dominant position in the wake of the policy of détente - the gap between the northern and southern hemisphere became all the more clear, but also the willingness to grapple with the cultural wealth of the so-called “third parties” at the time World “grew noticeably. In 1979 the Berliner Festspiele, under the direction of Jochen R. Klicker and Gereon Sievernich, organized the first Horizonte - Festival of World Cultures with artists from Africa. Sievernich also directed the three other festivals, which were devoted to Latin America in 1982, East and Southeast Asia in 1985 and the Orient in 1989. The success of these events gave the impetus in 1989 to establish a permanent place for dealing with the non-European world based on a concept from the Berliner Festspiele: the House of World Cultures in the former congress hall in the Tiergarten.

In 1981 the Martin-Gropius-Bau was opened with the exhibition Prussia conceived by the Berlin Festival . Attempt to take stock again opened. That was the beginning of a series of large cultural and art-historical exhibitions. It followed u. a. Beijing Palace Museum - Treasures from the Forbidden City (1985); Europe and the Emperors of China (1985), Europe and the Orient (1989), Japan and Europe (1993); Jewish Worlds (1992); Moscow-Berlin, Berlin-Moscow (1995/96), Pictures of Germany - Art from a Divided Country (1997/98). In 2000 there was a “Theatrum mundi” of the present and a view of the future: 7 hills - images and symbols of the 21st century . 2006 saw the spectacular exhibition Egypt's Sunken Treasures and a comprehensive retrospective by the visual artist Rebecca Horn .

A special highlight in the history of the Festival was the 750th anniversary of the city of Berlin in 1987 with its extensive range of exhibitions, music, theater, film and open-air events organized by Berlin's cultural institutions and under the patronage of Berlin Festival took place.

The Berliner Festspiele have dedicated themselves to the promotion of contemporary music, despite all the maintenance of tradition - above all under artistic director Ulrich Eckhardt and program director Torsten Maß. The chronicle lists over 1000 commissioned productions, world premieres and first performances as well as comprehensive overviews of works. These include compositions by Pierre Boulez , John Cage , Hans Werner Henze , Olivier Messiaen , Mauricio Kagel , György Kurtág , Luigi Nono , Wolfgang Rihm , Kaija Saariaho , Karlheinz Stockhausen and Isang Yun .

When Joachim Sartorius took over as artistic director of the Berliner Festspiele in 2001, traditions were broken and the current, young music and theater scene increasingly promoted. New formats should appeal to a younger audience: in 2004 the Berliner Festwochen were dissolved and their focus was continued as independent festivals and series. From 2005 the music program became the Musikfest Berlin , the theater program for spielzeit'europa and the music biennale for MaerzMusik - festival for contemporary music.

The international literature festival berlin (ilb), which was added in 2005 and is an event of the Peter Weiss Foundation for Art and Politics , has been a regular guest event since 2005 and complements the festival activities every September. Joachim Sartorius wrote in the 2005 ilb program booklet about the festival that this “exceptional literary event of world renown closes a gap in the series of our festivals”. In the 2015 ilb program booklet, Thomas Oberender pointed out that the festival “has always seen itself as an advocate for politically and socially persecuted people”, which makes it “such a valuable guest” at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. In addition to the literature festival, the Peter Weiss Foundation regularly hosts special events in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. Among other things came Janne Teller (2012), Scott McCloud (2015) and Salman Rushdie (2015) at the Festspielhaus on.

In 2012 Thomas Oberender took over the management of the Berliner Festspiele. Under his directorship, topics such as immersion, the effects of digital cultural change on artistic practice, performativity, alternative artistic production methods and cross-genre approaches are increasingly being negotiated, both in artistic formats and in the context of discussion series and events.

Foreign Affairs, the international performing arts festival of the Berliner Festspiele, was founded in 2012 and lasted until 2016. It replaced the spielzeit'europa format and showed works by u. a. Kyohei Sakaguchi, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, William Forsythe , Boris Charmatz , Hofesh Shechter, Jan Fabre , Ragnar Kjartansson , Angélica Liddell , William Kentridge and Forced Entertainment . The artistic director of the first edition in 2012 was Frie Leysen , and the artistic director from 2013 to 2016 was Matthias von Hartz . The first edition of the Berliner Festspiele Edition was also published in 2012, making rare texts accessible to the public.

In 2013 the event series Ein Tag mit ... started: Until 2016, an artist and her * his cosmos were regularly presented in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.

From 2013 to 2015, guest performances by major companies such as Sasha Waltz & Guests, Robert Wilson , Nederlands Dans Theater and les ballets C de la B were presented in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele as well as exhibitions with works by Anish Kapoor , Barbara Klemm , Ai Weiwei and Tino Sehgal realized in the Martin-Gropius-Bau .

In 2016 and 2017 the Berliner Festspiele expanded its range of events to include the Immersion program series and the Circus program. In the Martin-Gropius-Bau there were exhibitions with works by u. a. Isa Genzken , William Kentridge and Omar Fast .

In 2018, choreographers Alain Platel and Hofesh Shechter, the second company of the Nederlands Dans Theater and the Shanghai Kunqu Opera Company performed again in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele with The Four Dreams of Linchuan , four classics of the Kunqu , the oldest form of China- Opera, which was first seen in Berlin as a complete cycle. In addition to works by Lee Bul , the Gropius Bau included works by Cornelius Gurlitt, films by the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta and an exhibition of archaeological finds from all over Germany.

Berlin Festival at a glance

year Happening
1951 Foundation of the Berliner Festwochen. Financing initially by the Western Allies, from 1953 by the State of Berlin. Together with the International Film Festival, an organizational unit was created as a subordinate authority.
1951 1st Berlin International Film Festival and 1st Berlin Festival Weeks: 153,000 visitors in 250 screenings
1951 to 1962 Intendant: Gerhart von Westerman
1963 Intendant: Wolfgang Stresemann
1964 to 1967 Artistic director: Nicolas Nabokov
1964 1st Berlin Theater Competition - from 1966 Theatertreffen and 1st Berlin Jazz Days (director: Joachim Ernst Berendt) - from 1981 JazzFest Berlin
1967 Foundation of the Berliner Festspiele GmbH. Financing will be shared equally between the State of Berlin and the Federal Republic of Germany.
1968 Artistic director: Peter Löffler
1969 to 1972 Artistic director: Walther Schmieding
1973 to 2000 Intendant: Ulrich Eckhardt
1977 Relocation from Bundesallee to Budapester Str. 48/50
1979 to 1989 Horizons - Festival of World Cultures (every three years). In 1989, the former congress hall emerged as an independent house of world cultures.
1980 1st student theater meeting - from 1985 theater meeting for young people , the results of the national competition students make theater.
1981 The Martin-Gropius-Bau will be reopened as part of the Berliner Festwochen with the exhibition Prussia - Attempting to take stock . The Berliner Festspiele thus begin a long series of important art-historical exhibitions.
1984 1st meeting of young songwriters - from 1991 meeting of young music scene shows results of the national competition students make songs.
1986 1st meeting of young authors - the results of the national competition for students writing will be presented.
1987 Conception and implementation of the celebrations for the 750th anniversary of the city of Berlin a. a. with city festival, star hours and water parade. For the first time Berlin lessons in the Renaissance theater. The Topography of Terror exhibition will create an independent foundation.
1988 Music summer and other events as part of E 88 - Berlin European City of Culture.
1991 The Berlin Music Biennale is being taken over from the former GDR
1999 to 2001 Coordination of the celebrations for the turn of the millennium in Berlin, u. a. Exhibition 7 Hills - Images and Signs of the 21st Century in the Martin-Gropius-Bau.
2001 to 2011 Artistic director: Joachim Sartorius
2001 Relocation to the former Freie Volksbühne, Schaperstraße 24. The Berliner Festspiele now have their own theater for the first time: the Haus der Berliner Festspiele. They are now financed exclusively by the federal government.
2002 1. MaerzMusik - Festival for current music in the successor to the Music Biennale Berlin.
2002 Merger with the House of World Cultures, the Martin-Gropius-Bau and the Berlin International Film Festival to create federal cultural events in Berlin GmbH (KBB).
2004 1. spielzeit'europa - international dance and theater guest performances in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.
2005 1. Musikfest Berlin in cooperation with the Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation, as the successor to the festival weeks. The international literature festival berlin , founded in 2001, is taken over by the Berliner Festspiele.
since 2012 Artistic director: Thomas Oberender
2012 to 2016 Foreign Affairs - Festival for Theater and Performative Arts
2013 to 2016 Event series A day with ...
2015 Renaming MaerzMusik - Festival for Current Music to MaerzMusik - Festival for Time Issues
2016 Foundation of the Immersion program series
2017 The Circus program begins

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Legal notice of the official website
  2. ↑ literaturfestival.com ( Memento of the original from November 20, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.literaturfestival.com
  3. ↑ literaturfestival.com