Current Projects (2024-25)

Breaking the Hamster Wheel – from Effort to Impact: better strategies for increasing the accessibility of touring youth theatre

This partnership is focused on sharing knowledge and acting collaboratively to develop better professional practice for accessibility in touring theatre. More than merely wishing to create and tour two accessible formats, a key goal of this partnership is the long-term sustainability of efforts toward greater inclusivity. 

 

Our project centres around access-augmented performances of ‘HAMSTERRAD’. We develop formats to reduce the barriers experienced by existing regular visitor groups to both TAK and Theater Mierscher: For the blind audience in Mersch, an audio description and touch tour during the 2025 Colors of Blindness festival; for the audience with diverse sensory and cognitive needs who regularly visit TAK, a menu of relaxed performance protocols will be developed in Berlin then tailored to the needs of the audience in Vaduz.

Perform Europe Grant
EUR 60,000

Partners

Artistic Works

Hamsterrad
Producers: Theater Strahl
‘HAMSTERRAD’ is an energetic and contemplative piece of contemporary spoken (sung, streamed, and danced) theatre for young people aged 13+.

ME is fourteen or thereabouts. ME is in love with Lucie – but has kissed Andrej. They have to look after their little sister, they get their period, they have a mother with no free time, they are desperate to graduate from high school and they want nothing more than a massive hamster to introduce to the world on TikTok.

Our protagonist may not have a name at first, but we suspect that it is a strange name, one that is difficult to pronounce, like the word WOMAN or the word GRADUATE or the word LIFE. ‘HAMSTERRAD’ provides multi-layered insights into ME’s search for identity, poses questions about the pigeonholes we are shoved into and the niches we seek out, much like underground hamster tunnels in a networked world. The piece was created in cooperation with the Writing for Stage course at UdK Berlin.

Tour Dates

Photo credits

Thomas Aurin

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