About

The Federal Cultural Foundation’s Wanderlust Fund supports municipal, state and regional theatres in Germany which yearn to venture out and work together with theatres around the world. The fund, established in 2008, finances theatre partnerships between German and foreign theatres in Europe and faraway countries for two to three seasons. The Federal Cultural Foundation is currently funding 28 international theatre partnerships. As part of their collaboration, theatres develop joint productions, exchange personnel, share professional experience and host guest performances. The range of productions includes traditional dramatic works, dance, music and puppet theatre, youth projects and theatre for preschoolers. Some theatres co-produce a classic, others initiate an international research project, while other theatres commission playwrights to produce new plays – it all depends on the theatres’ aesthetic orientation and the themes they wish to explore.

In February 2010 the participating theatres began sharing their impressions of their joint meetings, workshops, guest performances and co-productions in our Wanderlust blog. Each season, three Pfadfinder (scouts) head out and visit the Wanderlust projects, describe the international theatre partnerships and document these exciting cross-border encounters in texts and images. You can recognise the posts of the Pfadfinder by the little black flag on the right side of the entry.

In our Spotlight we focus every three months on a different topic or debate which is central for the work of our Wanderlust cooperations. The first Spotlight went online in August 2010; author Petra Kohse discusses in it the pros and cons of different solutions for dealing with multilingual theatre productions or guest performances in a foreign language. You can recognise the Spotlight posts by the little torch on the right side of the entry.

What makes the Wanderlust Fund so unique is its variety – a vast array of theatre projects and theatre aesthetics, the stories told on stage and the people who tell them. The Wanderlust blog aims to capture this diversity. And the entries on this blog are as international as the theatre partnerships themselves. Although the menu headings and introductory texts are in English, our bloggers are free to write in whatever language they feel at home with. Of course, this makes the Wanderlust blog an experiment in finding ways to communicate with one another and determining which types of exchange are possible.

In addition to the entries by the Pfadfinder and participating theatres, the Wanderlust blog also includes a travel map showing the location of all the theatre partnerships and an event calendar of upcoming performances, presentations, and guest performances supported by the Wanderlust Fund.

If you would like to leave a comment – be it your impression of a Wanderlust production or your thoughts regarding a blog entry – please include your name and e-mail address in the fields above the comment box before sending your comment. We will not publish or use your e-mail address for any purpose except to notify you if others wish to respond to your comment.

We hope you enjoy following our Wanderlust blog!