Art And Politics And The Zürcher Theater Spektakel

Abstract

Maria Magdalena Schwaegermann talks with Margaret Hamilton

Founded in 1980, the Zürcher Theater Spektakel is an annual festival held over eighteen days in August on the shores of Lake Zurich. Each year the festival presents an international program of established and emerging companies and artist…

Maria Magdalena Schwaegermann has been the Artistic Director of the festival since 2002, and the 2007 festival will be her last festival. Under Schwaegermann’s direction the festival has presented a significant number of Australian projects including Yuè Lìng Jié by the Elision Ensemble, Soft by Back to Back Theatre, the Australian Museum of Modern Oddities, Acrobat, Blood Links by William Yang, the Australian Body series of performances featuring work by Lucy Guerin, Ros Warby, Rosalind Crisp and Helen Herbertson, and the Australian Indonesia collaboration The Theft of Sita. That is, arguably, the largest contingent of contemporary Australian performing arts recently presented in a non-English speaking European context not dependent upon a Federal government cultural promotion and funding initiative targeting Switzerland.