We’re looking for current translations of plays that are adaptations or new versions of ancient myths or rework mythical material for our new festival and book project Ancient Myths. New Translations, which is planned for 2025-2026.

The festival will include six staged readings, panel discussions and meet-ups between authors and translators over one weekend. In particular, we’re looking for plays that use mythical material in order to address new/old conflicts, generational change and important political and social issues from a critical perspective. The aim is to show the great diversity of themes and aesthetics in international contemporary drama.

Questions that particularly interest us are: What role do ‘fiction’ and ‘myth’ play on stage today after the post-dramatic era? What does it mean to put oneself in the role of another (perhaps archetypal) character instead of using one’s own biography or theoretical ideas as a starting point? What myths from other cultures exist that are less familiar to us and what do they have in common?

Along with researching, presenting and publishing new plays, the focus will be on questions of translation that arise in this context: How can intertextuality, adaptations and the phenomenon of ‘déjà-lu’ be taken into account in theatre translations?

Ideally the plays submitted should be already translated into German (or almost finished). Plays that have already been published in the book series Drama Panorama – Neue internationale Theatertexte and plays that are more than ten years old will not be considered.

The book series Drama Panorama – Neue internationale Theatertexte presents contemporary plays in German translation and is published by Neofelis Verlag in collaboration with Drama Panorama: Forum für Übersetzung und Theater e. V.. Eight anthologies of plays have been published to date. 

We look forward to submissions by the 16th of September 2024 to: Charlotte Bomy charlotte.bomy@drama-panorama.com and Anna Galt anna.galt@drama-panorama.com.