Insights into the festival “Theater der Welt” - monthly talk series
- 18:00: Panel discussion with Dorothea Marcus (theatre critic) and Dr Yvonne Griesel (theatre translator) with the directors of the festival in Chemnitz 2026, Stefan Schmidtke and Dr Christoph Dittrich
- Intermission
- 19:15: Film "Theatre in Trance" by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Documentary about the 1981 the festival in Cologne, 91 minutes
After stops in Hamburg, Düsseldorf and most recently Frankfurt am Main, the festival “Theater der Welt” is coming to Chemnitz from 18 June to 5 July 2026. Since 1981, the festival has travelled to a different city every three years - the only edition in Saxony to date took place in Dresden in 1996. An individual programme is created at each location. For the upcoming edition, Chemnitz Theatre, Chemnitz 2025 gGmbH and the Festival Academy Brussels are responsible for the programme.
Over the past few months, nine international curators have been travelling on behalf of the festival management. They come from Australia, Canada, Argentina, South Africa, Greece, Jordan, India, China and Senegal. They have tracked down the currently most exciting plays in their regions in order to bring them to Chemnitz in summer 2026.
How does a festival programme like this actually come about? What can the audience expect during the three festival weeks? And how do the city's theatres prepare for the numerous guest performances?
This monthly series of talks takes a look behind the scenes, tells of artistic discoveries, encounters and preparations - and arouses curiosity about a unique festival.
On 27 January, Dr Christoph Dittrich and Stefan Schmidtke will talk to cultural journalist and theatre critic Dorothea Marcus and theatre translator Dr Yvonne Griesel about their very specific experiences and adventures in the international festival business. Dr Christoph Dittrich, General Director of Theater Chemnitz, and Stefan Schmidtke, Programme Director of Chemnitz 2025 gGmbH, together with Inge Ceustermans from the Festival Academy Brussels, form the artistic directorship for Theatre of the World in Chemnitz. Stefan Schmidtke brings his own experience as a long-standing festival organiser to this interview. He has worked for the Wiener Festwochen, directed the Theaterformen festival in Hanover and Braunschweig and the Theatre of the World 2020 festival in Düsseldorf. He is currently designing the programme for Theater der Welt in Chemnitz together with nine international curators.
Theatre critic Dorothea Marcus provides an outside perspective as a "multi-viewer". As a reviewer and member of various theatre juries, the Cologne-based journalist has attended countless performances at festivals in Germany and abroad. She reports on them for the radio, the theatre magazine Theater heute and the online platform nachtkritik.de.
The translator Dr Yvonne Griesel makes international theatre productions accessible to German-speaking audiences in the first place, e.g. with surtitles. As an expert in the translation of theatre texts, she works for various festivals, theatres and publishers and is aware of the role of language in understanding international productions.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1981 film "Theatre in Trance" will then be shown. Fassbinder accompanied and observed the artists and audience at the first edition of the 1981 Theatre of the World festival in Cologne with his camera. The result is an impressive documentation of the programme with more than 30 groups from 15 countries and over 100 performances.
The next event in the talk series "Insights into the Festival" will take place on Tuesday, 24 February 2026 in the Hartmannfabrik.
