This trip was always intended as a conversation, not a tour. A conversation with (first and foremost) the work, then with each other, then those with whom we interact and finally the city itself. It's why I asked each group to read the book. Not as some empty academic exercise (with a not so academic book) — busy reading — but I wanted you to use it as a way to see that at some point all stories converge. 

We are here to experience, dislocate, reassess and experience and repeat. All things build on what follows if you pay attention — sometimes intended — sometimes fortuitous — sometimes dissonant — sometimes a failed experiment. 

Our 2018 works so far are some of the most diverse and least concrete of the performances/productions I have seen in all the years I've come here. Why is that? Why so much variety and instability? I think it is in no little part attributable to the fact that you all have arrived in a city in the throes of institutional and aesthetic change. The cultural landscape has shifted — is shifting. This is a great moment to be here because they — the theater-makers AND the audiences — are trying to find themselves. I see it so clearly in all the new work and the strange unsteadiness in the older, existing works. All you had to do was sit in the echoing emptiness that was Volksbühne right before WOMEN IN TROUBLE began to know that something big — something odd — is going on. Don't you feel it even in the heat?

Weibke Nonne as Schaubühne and Shahrzad Rahmani like to call this the most exclusive, private, little known theatre festival in the world. The temptation might be to expect that this would be definitive anthology of German Theater (Theatertreffen acknowledges the futility of that even while trying to make the attempt.) I would never do that. I couldn't do that. One, it's not my style. And, two, it would be impossible. It's a curated snapshot of a very interesting moment in German and perhaps, by extension, Western theater.