The NYU Department of German, Deutsches Haus at NYU, and Poetics and Theory at NYU present a reading of "Danish Sushi" a play by Hannah Zufall with Joscelyne Wilmouth, Ulrich Baer, Marlene Hoffmann, Shanga Parker, Jeff Hughes. Excerpts translated and directed by Raymond Blankenhorn.
The reading of selected excerpts will be followed by a discussion on themes and questions in contemporary German theatre featuring among Hannah von Sass (aka Hannah Zufall), Brandon Woolf, and Florian Fischer, which will be moderated by Raymond Blankenhorn.
About "Danish Sushi:"
In a quest to tell her version of the popular fairy tale, Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid comes from 19th century Copenhagen to a modern city resembling New York. Who is this mermaid? Where does she come from? And what fate will she be served?
Danish Sushi, by Hannah Zufall, was shortlisted for the Chemnitzer Theater Prize for New Drama 2020, and is currently under consideration for the Vienna Culture Summer 2023.
About the participants:
Raymond Blankenhorn (moderator) is a director, writer, and dramaturg, and is currently a graduate student in German Studies at New York University. Assistant directing credits include Socrates (The Public Theater), Dan Cody’s Yacht (Manhattan Theatre Club), and The (*) Inn (Abrons Arts Center). Raymond has worked on premieres both on Broadway (A Doll’s House, Part 2) and in Berlin at the Schaubühne (Italienische Nacht, Champignol wider Willen). He has been a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, the recipient of a Goethe Institut Fellowship for International Theater, and a Jonathan Alper Directing Fellow. His work has been presented at theatres and festivals including JACK, the Arcola Theatre, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He holds a BA in Classics from Oxford University and is an Associate of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC).
Florian Fischer studied philosophy, English and history as well as theatre directing at the Otto Falckenberg School in Munich. He won the Fast Forward Prize for Young Directors with his diploma project Der Fall M - Eine Psychiatriegeschichte. In 2016 he worked at NTGent with the performance Kroniek or how to lie dead in your flat for 28 months. In 2018, Florian staged To Name Herstory in Ghent, based on a novel by Kathy Acker. For his production Operation Kamen at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden in co-production with Archa Theatre Prague, he received the Kurt Hübner Directing Prize in 2019. This was followed by productions at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg (Monte Mortale) and the world premiere production of Tragödienbastard by Ewe Benbenek at the Schauspielhaus Wien. At the Schauspielhaus Bochum he staged the radio play Unsichtbar in the 2018/19 season and the performance Geister in der Zeche Eins in the 2019/20 season.
Hannah von Sass / Hannah Zufall is a postdoctoral fellow at the Peter Szondi-Institute of Comparative Literature, Free University Berlin, funded by the German Research Council (DFG) and a 2022/23 visiting Humboldt Scholar at New York University in the Department of German. Currently, she is pursuing a research project on the terminology in theater text theories and is leading the international research network Studies on contemporary playwriting, also funded by the German Research Council (DFG). In 2018 she obtained a Ph.D in German Literature from the Institute for German Literature at Humboldt University (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Steffen Martus), with a scholarship of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes and with a research scholarship of the PhDnet The Knowledge of Literature at the Department of German, University of California, Berkeley. Her plays have been performed at the Deutsches Theater Göttingen, Zimmertheater Tübingen, Schauspielhaus Graz, and Landestheater Schwaben. She has written for the award-winning TV series Waitin' for the bus (Warten auf’n Bus, 2021) and created libretti for the Bremer Kammerphilharmonie, Philharmonie Jena, and Oper Leipzig. Hannah is the recipient of the Künstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf residency (2018), the Clara und Eduard Rosenthal residency (2018/19), the Styria-Artist-in-Residency (2020), the Kolleg Friedrich Nietzsche Scholarship (2020), the Deutscher Preis für Nature Writing (2022) and most recently a nomination for the Grabbe-Förderpreis for her play Black Red Golden (Schwarz Rot Golden, 2022/23).
Brandon Woolf is an interdisciplinary theater artist and clinical associate professor at New York University, where he directs the Program in Dramatic Literature. Institutional Theatrics, his book on contemporary performance and cultural policy in Berlin, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2021. Brandon also co-edited Postdramatic Theatre and Form (Bloomsbury Methuen, 2019), and is currently collaborating with Stew, the Tony Award-winning playwright and composer of Passing Strange, on a book that explores Stew’s catalogue of performance works in the context of intersecting discourses on race, theater, and rock ‘n’ roll (forthcoming from University of Michigan Press). Concurrent with his scholarship, Brandon’s artistic work explores theater’s capacity as a social practice. Over the last decade he co-founded and co-directed three public performance ensembles – Culinary Theater, Shakespeare im Park Berlin, and the UC Movement for Efficient Privatization [UCMeP]. His recent site-specific work, The Console, was profiled in the New York Times and subsequently by an array of local and international outlets including Barbara Fuchs’ Theater of Lockdown (Bloomsbury Methuen, 2021) and The Kelly Clarkson Show on daytime TV.
Attendance Information:
The University's COVID-19 vaccination requirements - that all members of the NYU community, including employees, faculty members, students, affliliates, vendors, and visitors, must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and, once eligible, boosted - remain in force.
All visitors must be prepared to present proof of compliance with the University's COVID-19 vaccination requirments if asked to do so.
To RSVP for in-person attendance, please click here.
This event will take place at 42 Washington Mews. This semester based on NYU guidelines, in-person events will be open to members of the general public.
This staged reading of Danish Sushi is generously cosponsored by the NYU German Department, Deutsches Haus at NYU, and Poetics and Theory at NYU. Additional support provided by the DAAD from funds of the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).