Each year, FIND Festival finds (no pun intended) really exciting performances and brings them to Berlin. It’s enough to bring out a childish delight in all of us. And this year children figure prominently in the productions.
There is the preview of Valentina, a new work from this year’s artist in focus Caroline Guiela Nguyen, which explores the conundrum of a Franco-Romanian child having to translate a note from the doctor containing world-shattering news to a mother who speaks no French. Swiss director Milo Rau has children reenact brutal violence in Medea’s Children, which revisits a contemporary crime through a mythic lens.
Childhood also gets the retrospective treatment in two monologues; the Argentinian-Spanish actor Gonzalo Cunill performs an emotionally volatile reconsideration of a friendship’s dissolution in Un Sublime Error, written just for him by Jan Lauwers. In a handball court illuminated by her own fancy and projection, actress Kate Gilmore offers a painful life in fragments – beginning with a disastrous childhood – in Enda Walsh’s Safe House, scored by Anna Mullarkey.
Of course, there are the social tableaus that have made Nguyen her name: Lacrima, about the labourers who suffer to create a wedding dress for the British royal family, and Saigon, set in a Vietnamese restaurant that slips between Paris and Saigon, 1996 and 1956, as it reckons with the legacy of French colonialism.
And that’s not to mention the impressive Spinne from Maja Zade, which has been playing at the Schaubühne since last summer but only now been given English surtitles, or the first Kyrgystani work at the theatre, Nest, which offers a glimpse into a post-Soviet reality.
As it is every year, FIND Festival is a stage of plenty.
- FIND Festival, Apr 4-13, Schaubühne, details
