The programme for this year’s Radar Ost festival will focus on Ukraine.
This year’s edition of Deutsches Theater Berlin’s festival of Eastern European theatre, Radar Ost, will takes place from 8 to 12 March 2023 and, as a reaction to the ongoing war in Europe, will focus on Ukraine. The line-up will include six co-productions, world premieres and guest performances from Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia and Slovenia.
The festival begins with H*ml*t, a cooperation between the Deutsches Theater and Kyiv’s Left Bank Theatre. Rehearsals for the theatre’s production of Hamlet were supposed to begin on February 24, 2022, on the day Russia attacked Ukraine. The show explores the production that did not take place and creates a space for reflection.
Over the next five days, audiences can also see humane? described as a ‘theatrical-musical mass’ by mariia & magdalyna and the musician Khrystyna Kirik, and Dogs of Europe, the ambitious dystopian epic by Belarus Free Theatre based on the novel by Alhierd Bacharevič – which is now banned in Belarus. In 2021, Belarus Free Theatre company members were forced to relocate from their home country as a result of Lukashenko’s increasingly aggressive suppression of protest and dissent following the 2020 elections.
Belarus Free Theatre co-founders Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada. Photo: Marilyn Kingwill
The line-up also includes Medea s01e06 by Paata Tsikolia, a guest performance from the Royal District Theatre, Tbilisi; Crises, a piece on the theme of environmental collapse by the Slovenian director Žiga Divjak, and Danse Macabre, Vlad Troitskyi’s piece for the Center of Contemporary Art DAKH, which was written shortly after the start of the war.
There will also be a exhibitions, talks and music and a long reading night [Alp]Traum Europa which will last until sunrise.
The Radar Ost festival was established in 2018 to explore the work and deepen relationships with theatre makers of Eastern European countries.
For further information, visit deutchestheater.de
Further reading Radar Ost 2021 – venturing beyond frontiers
Further reading: Belarus Free Theatre: “We are stronger than a dictatorship”
Natasha Tripney is a writer, editor and critic based in London and Belgrade. She is the international editor for The Stage, the newspaper of the UK theatre industry. In 2011, she co-founded Exeunt, an online theatre magazine, which she edited until 2016. She is a contributor to the Guardian, Evening Standard, the BBC, Tortoise and Kosovo 2.0
