Alliance of International Production Houses

We ask the really big questions: To want or not to want?

The FFT and the inclusive Hamburg theatre group Meine Damen und Herren have been friends for many years now. Now, the FFT has moved to new spaces, and Meine Damen und Herren have changed into a collective. It is time to elevate our friendship to a new level! We will start a two-year collaboration, beginning with the 23/24 season: We will visit and learn from each other. Meine Damen und Herren develop and show artistic works in Düsseldorf. Furthermore, they will also assume the host mantle. Together, we are interested in questions of division of labour and in the relation between care work and art.

Meine Damen und Herren are synonymous with a lived practice of interlocking structures and art, and how they can act in productive correlation, especially in the shaping of artistic processes. Since 1996, Meine Damen und Herren have developed “radical participatory theatre utopias” (as per the title of one of the group’s multi-year work concepts). They were awarded the 2022 Tabori Prize of the Fonds Darstellende Künste for this. Meine Damen und Herren are a steady group of professional actors with varying cognitive prerequisites. Their self-descriptions – inclusive, special abled, disabled, or “learning impaired” – remains an open discussion within the group.

They decided to work as a collective in 2019. With increasingly open collaborative structures, Meine Damen und Herren simultaneously become more confident and flexible, constantly developing new methods and formats, working in different constellations, researching topics and modes of work, evaluating those processes while devising the next steps to take the needs and interest of everyone involved into account. They develop their artistic projects, addressed to both an adult as well as a young audience, based on intense discussion and research phases.