Welcome to Equity in Theatre

Fannina is a dramaturg, director, and translator who divides her time between Germany and Canada. She studied English Literature and Theatre at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany and at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. From 2011 until 2014 she was the Literary Assistant at the Arts Club in Vancouver, where favourite production dramaturgy credits include Bruce Norris' Clybourne Park, David Ives' Venus in Fur, and Colleen Murphy's Armstrong's War.

As a freelancer, she worked with Mark Lawes and the company of Theatre Junction in Calgary as their dramaturg on the creation Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, a mixture of theatre, dance, film, and live music (2015). Throughout 2013 she co-directed and dramaturged The Beast that Escaped/Warning Confidential, a new play and live installation about medicalized bodies at SFU School for the Contemporary Arts. In 2011 and 2013 she worked as a production dramaturg for Bard on the Beach (The Merchant of Venice, Elizabeth Rex), and in 2012 directed her own adaptation of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther at Frederic Wood Theatre.

Fannina writes extensively about theatre, exploring its intersections with techniques and notions of adaptation, contemporary culture, and democracy. The current focus of her artistic work is the possibility of theatrical adaptation as a distinctly postmodern form; a form that through processes of fragmentation, rupture, collage, pastiche, and reconstruction is able to reflect and mirror the current human condition as shaped daily by the media, war, traffic, chaos, competition, and capitalism. How is the form of theatrical adaptation related to the psychosis, schizophrenia, and disorientation associated with contemporary existence, and particularly effective at reflecting questions of inevitability, cyclicality, and disenchantment? Considering modern notions of intertextuality and “remixing,” such as Hip Hop, Rap, DJs, copyright wars, and queerness, to what extent are we living in an “age of adaptation”? And if we are, how can we use and thematize that idea in performance? How can we channel—adapt—elements of other practices, such as pop, film, night clubs, musicals, dance, and opera to create new theatrical forms that explore notions of postmodernity? How does adaptation relate to (post-) modern notions of “identity”?

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