Antje Schupp
Multifaceted joint creations
Swiss Performing Arts Award 2021
Antje Schupp was born in Munich in 1983. She studied theatre, film and media science as well as cultural studies in Vienna, and directing for theatre and opera at the Bavarian Theatre Academy in Munich. Today, the director, performer and author lives in Basel, where she stages spoken and musical theatre, creates her own productions in the independent scene, and often works in co-creative processes as well as with non-professional performers. She is interested in contemporary political, ecological and social issues, which she combines into part-documentary, part-fiction narratives using a wide range of stylistic elements. Antje Schupp received the Zurich Festival Prize in 2020. That gave rise to a seven-part film essay entitled “Revue 2020 – Zurück ist die Zukunft”, produced under COVID-19 restrictions. In 2021 she is the recipient of the Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz Prize from the City of Jena.
Antje Schupp develops her works using a variety of methods woven together using the techniques of performance and dance, musical theatre and text. The list of her works to date is a long one: she produces at a fixed roster of institutions including the Theater Basel, Schauspielhaus Zürich, Theater am Neumarkt, Konzert Theater Bern and the Staatstheater Augsburg, while also touring to international festivals. She works regularly with Beatrice Fleischlin, for example on “Islam for Christians – A Crash Course (Level A1)” (2015), produced at the Kaserne Basel. The international joint production “Pink Mon€y”, which premièred in Soweto, South Africa, in 2017, blends performance, party and protest in a queer club setting. Antje Schupp directed her first documentary, “Music was my first love”, together with Silvio Meessen in June 2021.
Antje Schupp seems fearlessly at home in a whole range of contexts. How else to explain her success in so many different forms and methods? Her unwillingness to distinguish between her functions as director, ensemble creator, author and performer is a stroke of immense good fortune for the theatre world. In every one of her works, the open-minded curiosity with which she tackles weighty and often difficult topics conveys itself to the audience, enabling her to be highly political at all times but without moralising. The precision and sense of mischief that she brings to both content and aesthetics come together in theatre evenings that are as pleasurable as they are stimulating.
Nicolette Kretz, jury member
