30 August 2021

Award of the Joana Maria Gorvin Prize to Andrea Breth

Sunday, 5 September 2021, 11.30 am, Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg

The Akademie der Künste is awarding the Joana Maria Gorvin Prize 2020 to the theatre and opera director Andrea Breth. Nele Hertling will deliver a welcome address at the matinée award ceremony on Sunday, 5 September 2021, and Hermann Beil will deliver the laudatory speech. The celebratory programme will feature landmarks in Breth’s career, with examples of films along with texts and music: from the Bochum production of Süden in 1987 and her artistic direction of the Schaubühne from 1992 to 1997 to her influential Burgtheater period up to 2018 and beyond. The guests include Adam Benzwi, Corinna Kirchhoff, Roland Koch, Georg Nigl, Klaus Völker and Johanna Wokalek.

In her multi-award-winning productions, Andrea Breth impressively succeeds in making theatre present, anchoring the present in the past in order to also envisage future events and to assert theatre as a place of dreaming. As a director, she gives everything to her actors; (…) when she has done a thorough job, the traces of her precise work, work that is always unreservedly committed to her feelings, are obliterated,” says the jury consisting of Jürgen Flimm, Christian Grashof, Volker Ludwig, Klaus Völker and Jossi Wieler.

The Joana Maria Gorvin Prize of the Akademie der Künste was established by Maximilian B. Bauer in 1995 in memory of the great actress, his wife, who died in 1993. Every five years, a jury of five male artists from the Performing Arts Section honours the “outstanding achievement of a female theatre artist in the German-speaking world”. The most recent prize winners were Anja Silja (2005), Jutta Lampe (2010) and Kirsten Dene (2015). The prize is endowed with EUR 10,000.

Event details
Joana Maria Gorvin Prize 2020 goes to Andrea Breth
Award ceremony
Sunday, 5 September 2021, 11.30 am
Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin
Admission free. Registrations to ticket@adk.de, admission tickets available on the door
With Adam Benzwi, Andrea Breth, Hermann Beil (laudatory speech), Corinna Kirchhoff, Roland Koch, Nele Hertling (welcome address), Georg Nigl, Klaus Völker, Johanna Wokalek and others

See press release of 27 January 2021