It’s about the Aghet, the genocide of the Armenians during the First World War. With the multidisciplinary festival 100 + 10 – Armenian Allegories, the Maxim Gorki Theater is looking back on the catastrophe for the tenth year. From 24.04. to 31.05.2025, the series of events forms the prelude and prologue to the 7th Berlin Autumn Salon RE-IMAGINE! In addition to new pieces, works that deal with Armenian reality from the last decade will be shown. Armenian stories from all over the world will be told — conceived and realized by over 150 artists, in visual art, films and concerts. “The Bird of a Thousand Voices” opens the festival: musician Tigran Hamasyan, a two-time winner of the German Jazz Award in 2021, stages a new version of an old Armenian fairy tale as a performance between opera and kinetic stage art. The day after, “Donation” celebrates its world premiere: Arsinée Khanjian uses her body as a medium to make experiences of violence and trauma tangible. In the play, the Canadian actress wants to donate historical film costumes to an archivist as a reminder of the genocide. The latter questions the memorial value and added value of the artifacts.

The opening weekend also marks the start of the literary series “My Soul in Exile”, with author Anahit Bagradjans bringing voices from Armenian and diaspora Armenian literature to the stage. Writer Fatma Aydemir, known for her novel “Elbow”, and author and actress Maryam Zaree will read from and discuss the novella by the Armenian poet Zabel Yesayan, which gives the series its title, on April 27. On the same evening, actors Benita Bailey, Saro Emirze and Alina Manoukian will read from Fatih Akın’s screenplay for the film “The Cut”. It tells the story of the blacksmith Nazaret. Until the end of May, the Gorki will be building bridges to the present, asking how past suffering affects the present and what lessons we can learn.

Text: Isabel Raab / Photos: Anush Babajanyan; Nazek Armenakyan, Untitled from the series Red, Black White, 2021; Piruza Khalapyan, The Door to Hell, Nor Getashen, Shahumyan Province, Artsakh, 2020

Maxim Gorki Theater, Am Festungsgraben 2, 10117 Berlin–Mitte; map
100 + 10 – Armenian Allegories 24.04.–31.05.2025. Admission to the exhibition is free of charge. 

@maxim_gorki_theater

If you wanted to find an image for FIND 2025, the Festival International New Drama at the Schaubühne, you would only have to talk about Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s new play. In Lacrima, the French-Vietnamese director — to whom this year’s festival is dedicated — weaves questions of origin, class and work into a story that spans continents. Commissioned to make a wedding dress for the British royal family, a British fashion designer, a Parisian pattern maker, lace makers in Alençon, and a bead maker in Mumbai set to work. FIND is characterized by the exploration of universal themes from different geographical perspectives. Current plays from around the world, always subtitled in English, have been staged in Wilmersdorf for more than twenty years. This year, with plays from France, Belgium, Ireland, Spain, the USA and Kyrgyzstan, the focus turns inward, toward families within their own homes. But at FIND, the private sphere is inherently political, whether in Saigon or Strasbourg. Walloon actor Cédric Eeckhout takes a deeply personal look back in Héritageby bringing his mother on stage. On paper, 75-year-old Jo lived exactly as women of her time were expected to — marrying at 19, having three children, building a house, buying dresses, and keeping up with the latest vacuum cleaner. Yet beneath this conventional life, Cédric Eeckhout discovers an emancipatory role model: a heroine who sought independence and passed this sense of freedom on to her son.

The protagonist in Safe House also wants to come to terms with a past full of violence and grief. In an empty handball hall in Galway, Ireland, the young protagonist, Tony winner Enda Walsh, and composer Anna Mullarkey sings her way into a new phase of life. The characters in Milo Rau’s Medea’s Kinderen struggle with similar traumas. Rau blends Euripides’ tragedy of the child murderess with a real Belgian case and lets the children themselves have their say. A daughter must speak and translate for her mother in Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s latest work Valentina. Guiela Nguyen, who researched the Romanian community in Strasbourg for the play, tells the story of what it means to take responsibility for your parents’ lives as a child with a history of migration. The daughter, Valentina, is caught between two stools. Does she translate a diagnosis of illness that does not bode well, or does she leave her mother in the dark? The FIND plays send us back to our everyday lives with these questions: How do we deal with pain, both our own and that of others? How do we find words when we can’t see the way out and still want to talk about hope?

Text: Laura Storfner / Photos: Bea Borgers, Louis Fernandez

Schaubühne at Lehninger Platz, Kurfürstendamm 153, 10709 Berlin–Wilmersdorf; map

FIND – Festival International New Drama 04.–13.04.2025. Find the full program here. 

@schaubuehne_berlin