A Unique Corporeal & Visual Director

Katrine Wiedemann (born 1969). Self-taught. Debut 1992
Wiedemann’s staging is very corporeal.  So, it is fitting that she was the one to bring new circus and theatre together on the Danish stage – particularly, in collaboration with the Swedish group, Cirkus Cirkör.
Katrine Wiedemann put together the first cross-over performance between theatre and new circus, when she did Shakespeare’s The Tempest at Kaleidoskop. Her first collaboration with Cirkus Cirkör in 2002 was a version of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. The production was performed to sold-out houses in Stockholm and during Wiener Festwoche in 2003.
In the summer of 2005, Katrine Wiedemann, Cirkus Cirkör and Kaleidoskop were behind the greatest stage success of the celebration of Hans Christian Andersen’s 200th birthday with Havfruen [The Mermaid], which has since played with great success in Germany and Sweden (see the profile on Havfruen).

Wiedemann’s style as a director is very personal and very visual.  Scenography is essential to her staging.  It plays a decisive role in her interpretation.  At the same time, it must also play with and play up to the very physical style her direction requires of the actors.  For example, in Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, she made the actors into a living stage set, depicting a troubled, roaring river.
It is intelligent, thoroughly-designed theatre that is visually consistent.  Almost staged art. 

Since 1996, Katrine Wiedemann has had a close and successful collaboration with dramatist Jokum Rohde. His very intellectual and linguistic-visual dramas have been given a very distinctive and timely scenic form in their encounter with Katrine Wiedemann’s physical approach and keen, aesthetic eye. At the same time, their fascination with the dark corners of the human animal and life’s minor tones complement each other.

Current Productions

The Caucasian Chalk Circle
(2006)
By Bertolt Brecht. The Danish Royal Theatre, Turbine Halls.
The collaboration between Katrine Wiedemann and scenographer Christian Friedländer reaches a high point with Brecht’s drama. The stage consisted of three running conveyor belts that forced the actors to remain in motion.  In addition, the plot is presented in a filmic mode on parallel tracks and with parallel stories.   The production has been invited to the Brecht Festival organized by the Berliner Ensemble in August 2006.

Nora
(2005)
By Henrik Ibsen. Betty Nansen Teatret.
Nora is based on Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House but with sympathy for Helmer and the men in the story.  At the same time, Wiedemann had the actors physically play Ibsen’s subtexts. She has created a radically new approach to the classic.

Havfruen / The Mermaid
(2005)
By Hans Christian Andersen. Kaleidoskop and Cirkus Cikör.
Together with Cirkus Cikör, Katrine Wiedemann has created a version of Andersen’s fairy tale of the Little Mermaid with great poetry, humorous circus scenes, and a corporeal approach to the fairy tale that physically enters into the audience. (See the profile on Havfruen).

Pinocchios aske / Pinocchio’s Ashes
(2005)
By Jokum Rohde. The Danish Royal Theatre.
Jokum Rohde’s very dark, Expressionist–inspired Pinocchios aske about a country that bans art has been given a dramatic and gripping interpretation by Katrine Wiedemann. It is the culmination to this point of the very successful partnership between Katrine Wiedemann and Jokum Rohde. 

Romeo & Juliet
(2002)
By William Shakespeare. Dramaten, Stockholm.
The production was created in collaboration with Cirkus Cirkör and is one of the greatest successes the Royal Swedish Theatre, Dramaten, has had.  The performance was also invited in 2003 to the Wiener Festwoche.

Til Damaskus / To Damascus
(1999)
By August Strindberg. Gothenburg City Theatre.
Black Rider. By Robert Wilson and Tom Waits. Betty Nansen Teatret 1998
Along with artist Michael Kvium, Katrine Wiedemann staged the musical drama Black Rider in an abstract and comic book-like version that completely lived up to the original’s ideas and foundation.

Review Extracts

”… in Katrine Wiedemann’s version of The Caucasian Chalk Circle,  which is played with a serious straightforwardness, by the book, and with all her visual imagination and knack for telling a story with all the tools of the theatre.”
Berlingske Tidende (DK), The Caucasian Chalk Circle

”However banal the big blue, billowing sea may seem, the ensemble under the direction of Katrine Wiedemann and theatre director Tilde Björfors succeeds in creating an almost Shakespearean universe around storms, depths, reflections and mistaken identities.”
Aftonbladet (SE), Havfruen

”It is an odd Shakespearean performance that Dramaten has staged with director Katrine Wiedemann – new circus meets one of the most profound theatre classics.  At times, there is live music and best at bridging both forms is Melinda Kinnaman’s Julia.…”
Teatertidningen (SE), Romeo and Juliet