Theaterpreis des Bundes 2021
Jury statement
“What characterizes experimental theater? The American writer Chris Kraus writes that it is a ‘utopian diaspora.’ What is that supposed to mean? Utopia, a ‘non-place’ and diaspora, the scattered, dispersed ‘in-between.’ Quite simply a double negation, an impossible place. But the Papiertheater under Johannes Volkmann, which has been active in and beyond Bavaria since 1995, is exactly that. An interactive think tank that thinks and works exclusively with paper, which is in constant motion, but without a home, nomadic, always somewhere else, but always together with the places it travels to, and above all together with the people that the Papiertheater visits and invites to intervene in the world through its ‘social productions’: How can people really achieve peace? Why are children’s rights still not a matter of course all over the world? With the simple but powerful material of paper, the Papiertheater unites the seemingly contradictory with admirable ease: it is an archive of theatrical co-creation that will always have enough space to continue writing the future.” – Jury statement