Theatre-Award-Berlin by Stiftung Preußische Seehandlung

The Preußische Seehandlung Foundation has been awarding the Berlin Theater Prize since 1988. The prize is endowed with 20,000 euros and is intended to honor individuals who have rendered outstanding service to German-language theater through their life’s work or exceptional individual achievements.

The jury’s statement reads:

“With their plays, productions, and performances, Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué have significantly expanded, enriched, and refined the language of contemporary theater over the past 25 years. Their authorship is anti-authoritarian, their expression minimalist, their form maximally poetic. It is their subtle humor that makes the profound seriousness of their work possible. And their radical subjectivity in the analytical presentation and personal interpretation of historical and current events, conflicts, and crises—particularly in Lebanon—unfolds a vast, unsettling, and at times disturbing political force that illuminates and, at times, causes the aesthetic and performative basis of their artistic work—mostly in the form of their preferred format of lecture performances or ‘non-academic lectures’— “

The jury consists of: Nora Hertlein-Hull, director of the Theatertreffen; Matthias Pees, artistic director of the Berliner Festspiele; Martin Thomas Pesl, member of the Theatertreffen jury; and Annemie Vanackere, artistic director and managing director of the HAU Hebbel am Ufer theater.

The Berlin Theater Prize is awarded by the Governing Mayor of Berlin and Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Stiftung Preußische Seehandlung, Kai Wegner, represented this year by the Senator for Culture and Social Cohesion, Sarah Wedl-Wilson.

With

• Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mroué – directors, actors, playwrights
• Sarah Wedl-Wilson – Senator for Culture and Social Cohesion

(In German and partly in English)