Theatre, society and migration

More than a quarter of the people who live in Switzerland have an immigrant background (or foreground, depending on how you look at it) and are at home in more than one culture. However, this commonplace cultural diversity of Swiss immigrant society finds little echo in the schedules and structures of Swiss theatre.

The Swiss Theatre Festival has invited Nurkan Erpulat to shed expert light on the issue.  As a director and member of the artistic management at the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse (Berlin), and since 2013 at the Maxim Gorki Theater, he has played a decisive role in shaping the concept of post-migration theatre. In his presentation he will report on how migration has changed the issues that theatre tackles, placing this development in the context of German cultural and political discourse. In a subsequent workshop, the participants will be invited to transfer these experiences into the context of their theatre work in Switzerland.

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  Nurkan Erpulat was born in Ankara and first studied drama in Izmir before moving to the Ernst Busch University of Performing Arts in Berlin, where he studied directing. He has been invited to take his work to festivals and to guest appearances in Germany and abroad, and has won several awards. He staged the play that he developed together with Jens Hillje, Crazy Blood, at Berlin's Ballhaus Naunynstrasse in 2011. The production was invited that same year to the Berlin Theatre Festival and the Mülheim Theatertagen, and was voted play of the year in 2011 by the Theater Heute magazine; it remains part of the repertory of the Maxim Gorki Theater. At the Maxim Gorki Theater he directed, among other productions, Chekhov's “The Cherry Orchard”, “Entertaining Mr Sloane” by Joe Orton, “ Legal Haziness of a Marriage” by Olga Grjasnowa, and “Love It or Leave It!”.

  Simultaneous interpretation German - French

   

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