Uniater is a non-profit theatre association for young adults from Potsdam and Berlin. We focus on the field of artistic research and give students, young professionals and professionals the chance to network with each other and to explore other lived realities. The diversity of different perspectives of these “experts of everyday life” is a great enrichment to our artistically ambitious work. Since our founding in October 2012, our focus has been on documentary forms of drama in particular: non-theatrical texts such as spam mails, comments from Internet forums, Youtube videos or other social media content have repeatedly been used as the basis for dramatic scenes. The question, which we are thereby approaching playfully, is how society is changing due to these new technologies.
Since our founding, we produced the drama productions “Grimm? (2013) and “Spam! (2014), which were each awarded a prize by the German Children and Youth Foundation and Telefónica Deutschland Think Big. In 2015 “#theater” was created and its festival version “#networks” was invited to the international theatre festival FITUT in Tangier, Morocco in October 2015 and was awarded the special prize of the jury as well as the prize for Best Director. Since 2016, the ensemble has been working on the novel “Men in Space” by Tom McCarthy, which serves as the basis for our theatre series of the same name. In June 2016, the group presented a live trailer in cooperation with the band Vizedikator in the inner courtyard of the art and creative space Rechenzentrum; in June 2017, the first episode “Ikarus” was performed at Treffpunkt Freizeit together with the band Terminator Knödel.
Additionally, various scenic readings at freiLAND Potsdam (2012/’13/’14) or for the radio station freie Radio Potsdam (frrapó 2013) as well as improv shows at KuZe Potsdam, Freie Kunstschule Potsdam or at the Sound(g)arten of the Fabrik Potsdam were successfully staged.
In addition to its own productions, Uniater regularly strives to cooperate with other artists in other fields. In September 2013 we realized a scenic reading of Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis” with the music theatre ensemble I Confidenti under the title “Love Songs And Love Stories”. In September 2016, parts of the Uniater ensemble were performing on stage in “Schreibtischherrschaft” together with the theatre collective FRITZAHOI!. In September 2014, the ensemble gathered experience with international collaborations together with the Polish puppet theatre group Klinika Lalek. The street theatre spectacle “Momo” based on the novel by Michael Ende was created and sponsored by the German-Polish Youth Work and the Foundation for German-Polish Cooperation. The German-Georgian theatre exchange with ARTbridge from Tbilisi, Georgia began in autumn 2017.
In autumn 2017 the German-Georgian theatre exchange with ARTbridge from Tbilisi, Georgia took place in Potsdam. In 2018 the Uniater ensemble travelled to Jyväskyla, Finland for the international theatre workshop “The Method of Stanislavsky Today” and since January 2019 the group has been working on a German-Czech theatre exchange with the Czech group KočéBR from Brno, which is planned for the summer of 2020.