DAY 1 | Lawscapes: Theater and the Anthropocene

'Lawscapes: Theater and the Anthropocene' is a collaborative two-day workshop in which participants will focus on entanglements between humans and nonhuman entities, including rivers, whales, and minerals. How can theater help us think through and reimagine interspecies relationships -- as well as those between activists, educators, and policymakers?

In this performance lecture, Kevin Rittberger will introduce how he approaches these subjects through his work as a playwright and director. It will be followed by a conversation with Mateusz Borowski, Celeste Hammond, Oliver Sann, and Heidi Schlipphacke on creative, scientific, and legal approaches to environmental crisis.

The following day, Friday, April 18th, will be an all-day workshop focused on writing prompts.

Free and open to the public; please register for each day separately to help us plan accordingly.

This workshop is organized by the Anthropocene Lab, Germanic Studies (UIC), the Goethe-Institut Chicago, Prof. Mateusz Borowski, Prof. Oliver Sann (SAIC) and Kevin Rittberger.

BIOS

Kevin Rittberger was born in 1977 in Stuttgart, Germany, and is a playwright, director, and curator based in Berlin. Rittberger's more than 20 plays have been staged at theaters such as the Deutsches Theater Berlin, Schauspielhaus Vienna, Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Residenztheater Munich, and the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin. Notable works include Kassandra or The World as the end of the representation. In 2013 he directed his play „Mulian Rescues Mother Earth“ at the Taipei Arts Festival. As a performer he showed „UNL€ARNING WHITE NOISE“ together with Stefan Schneider at the Berliner Festspiele. In 2022 he co-organized the conference „Diffractive Word-Making: Theatre and Science Beyond the Capitalocene“ at the Indiana University Bloomington. His most recent shows were „Black Block“ (2020), „The Entrepreneur“ (2022), „Two Suns and a Setting“ (2023), „The Great Grey Shrike“ (Vom Zeugenschutz des Raubwürgers) and „Shredding Laws“ (2024).

Host or Publisher Goethe-Institut Chicago