Location: Berliner Festspiele
Editors: Antigone Akgün and Zofia nierodzinska
Assistance: Anna Reimnitz
Participants: İlker Çalışkan, Anastasia M. E. Gornizki, Aurelia Kraus, Klaudia Lagozinski, Günther Mailand

The Theatertreffen-Blog, also known as the Reflection Treffen, has been an integral part of the long-standing German-speaking Theatertreffen Festival since 2009. The platform was created to facilitate discussions around the festival and the theatre productions presented there.

This year for the first time I had the opportunity to co-curate the Theatertreffen blog together with Antigone Akgün, assisted by Anna Reimnitz. Through an open call, five bloggers (out of almost 100 applications) were selected to work with us for 18 days – the entire duration of the festival. We were looking for people with a professional connection to the theatre, but also for those for whom our collaboration was not an obvious continuation of their career paths, i.e. people from working class families, with a migration background and knowledge of contexts beyond the German-speaking cultural sphere.

We met daily for editorial meetings to discuss the productions and events we had seen. The working languages were German and English. Our aim was not only to describe and aesthetically evaluate what we had experienced, but more importantly to reflect on it and make connections to other socially, politically and ecologically relevant issues. Many forms of collaboration developed on the spot through direct exchange. In addition to the reflexive and commentary character of our work, which focused mainly on the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, we proposed an accompanying programme. It was based on the concern to „go out of the institution“ and visit places of community cultural production in different districts of multilingual and multiethnic Berlin. More on the TTBLOG and on the Instagram.