Fast Forward 2024

Once again this year there will a European festival jury, consisting of a festival curator, a director, a theatre critic and the artistic director of the Staatsschauspiel. On the last night, the jury will present a prize to one of the eight festival productions. The prize-winner(s) will receive an invitation to create a new piece of work at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden. Before their last meeting, the jury will also meet actors from the theatre’s ensemble to talk about the productions they saw.

Kate Craddock is a theatre maker, practice based researcher and founder and festival director of GIFT: Gateshead International Festival of Theatre, an annual artist-led festival celebrating contemporary theatre. She completed her practice led PhD in 2010 and has worked as a Senior Lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and at Northumbria University. She recently became Research Associate at Newcastle University. Her performance work has been at a range of organisations across the UK and in multiple international festival contexts

Janis El-Bira, born in 1986 in Braunschweig, studied philosophy and history and has since worked as a freelance journalist, author, presenter and editor with a focus on theatre as well as film and music. He is an editor at nachtkritik.de and at the theatre journal Rang 1 on Deutschlandfunk Kultur. From 2016-21 he was in charge of the Theatertreffen blog of the Berliner Festspiele and supervises projects for emerging theatre critics at the Outnow! Festival in Bremen and at the Deutsches Theater Berlin.

Kamilė Gudmonaitė, born in 1992, studied directing at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in Vilnius. As a student, she participated in the Fast Forward festival workshop in 2016. In 2018, she showed her production KETURI (Four) in the frame of the festival. In her pieces, she’s often looking for a dialogue between groups of society and therefore develops her own dramaturgies. This season she will direct at Theater Freiburg and Deutsches Theater Berlin. She is also the singer and songwriter of the duo Kamaniai Šilelis.

Joachim Klement, born in 1961 in Düsseldorf, dramaturge at theatres including Theater Graz, Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Nationaltheater Mannheim (head dramaturge), head dramaturg and vice-artistic director at the Bremer Theater and at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, artistic director of the Staatstheater Braunschweig, since 2017 artistic director of the Staatsschauspiel Dresden.