The Texan Caden Manson founded the Big Art Group in 1999 with the intention of breaking through the limitations of theater. Using a combination of film, television and performance, he examines how images are used for entertainment, how the audience experiences an image, where the crack between the surface and the interior life runs, and how truth is fabricated. "Flicker" was developed in January 2002 at the legendary Performance Space 122 in New York.

Hans Man In't Veld was one of the founders of the legendary Werkteater, and later on, he became the director of Kampnagel in Hamburg. He currently teaches the director's class and is a lecturer at the School of Theater in Amsterdam. Guido Kleene, founder of the Compagnie Dakar, was one of his students, and they developed the DAKAR Trilogy together.

For the last ten years, the Dood Paard company has been interpreting works by Aischylos, Euripides, Ovid, Shakespeare, Beckett, Albee, Handke, Rijnders, and many other authors. Dood Paard's projects are created during a collective process. Theatrical possibilities are reinvented and explored until their limits are reached. The unity of time and space are taken literally - the performances are unique, ambiguous, unpredictable events, which are created during the performance. The works of Dood Paard possess lightness and an overwhelming energy, which erupts into razor-sharp humor and ironic bitterness.

Forced Entertainment was founded in 1984. Since then, the group has worked more or less in the same formation. Themes and forms of expression are developed during the work process. With ingenious timing, a masterful gesamtkomposition is created from fragments of remembrances, ideas and set pieces from old and new stories.

The history of SPIELART is to a large extent also the history of Forced Entertainment. "Speak Bitterness," performed at SPIELART in 1997, was their first guest performance at a German theater festival. Since then, SPIELART has been a coproducer of all of the important new creations of Forced Entertainment, e.g., the 24-hour performance "Who can sing a song to unfrighten me?" in 1999, which is considered to be one of the most successful projects of Forced Entertainment and was performed at all of the important European theater festivals. This is also true of "First Night," which caused rare controversies among the audience at the SPIELART Theater Festival in 2001. Once again, SPIELART is presenting a coproduction with the company from Sheffield. The premiere performance of "Bloody Mess" is the preliminary result of a work-in-progress, which will be completed in 2004 in time for the 20th anniversary of the founding of Forced Entertainment.

"One of the most influential new British theater companies of the last 20 years." (The Guardian)

Jewgenij Grischkowez was born in Siberia in 1967. He served his military duty with the Soviet navy in the Pacific Ocean, and afterwards he studied philology at the "Technical University Kusbass" (Kursk coal fields), where he founded the "Loge" theater in 1990. He developed more than twenty original productions with this ensemble; his troupe developed the pieces collectively from conversations and improvisations. 1998 saw the creation of his piece "How I Ate a Dog," which he performs himself - he enjoyed a huge success with this piece in Moscow. The following year he presented his new piece, "Simultaneously."

Personally, Grischkowez rejects such terms as director, author or actor. He chose the term "new sentimentalist" to describe himself.

SSince the 2000/2001 season started, he has performed his pieces as a permanent guest at the "School of the Contemporary Play" theater. That same year he received the Russian "Anti-Booker Literature Award" for drama. In 2000, the jury of the national theater festival "The Golden Mask" presented him with the Innovation Award, and the Critics Jury presented him with the Audience Award for that theater season.

The theater collective Hotel Modern, founded in 1996, consists of the actors Pauline Kalker and Arlène Hoornweg, the performer Herman Helle, and the musician Arthur Sauer. They combine theater with puppet theater and other art forms in their productions. The company causes a type of "controlled chaos" on the stage, where text, properties, music and acting all make equal contributions to telling a story.

Born in 1972 in Switzerland, Stefan Kaegi is a director, an author of radio plays and a sound designer. During his studies at the School of Theater in Giessen, he started to work with Bernd Ernst under the label "Hygiene Heute." Among the projects they developed were "Europe dances. 48 Hours at a guinea pig convention" in Vienna, and the sound installation "Kanal Kirchner," which Hygiene Heute performed at the SPIELART Theater Festival 2001. The Abendzeitung, one of Munich's daily newspapers, awarded the production a star of the year and declared it the "Festival Tip." As the artistic group "Rimini Protokoll," Kaegi and Ernst collaborated with Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel to stage "Deutschland 2" ("Germany 2") - a live reenactment of an actual Bundestag session (the German parliament).

The performance group Komuna Otwock, named after a suburb of Warsaw, has been exploring the possibilities and impossibilities of the revolution for the last 15 years. Starting with theoretical-political questions, Komuna Otwock offers artistic answers, answers that focus on people. For each respective theme, the group always develops a corresponding stage language and adaptation for the stage. Various approaches are integrated into the artistic performance during the work process - the approaches range from acting to choreographed images to the use of visual media.

"Komuna Otwock proves that a theater performance can have a clear message, even without banality and crude symbolism. (…) here is a group finally that knows what it wants to express, and it is also capable of doing it in an outstanding fashion." (Didaskalia, March 2002)

Katarzyna Kozyra was born in Warsaw, and she studied visual art there until 1993. Since that time, her works have been shown in solo or group exhibitions all across Europe. In 1991, her video project "Men's Bathhouse" was performed in the Polish Pavilion at the Biennale in Venice.

In past years, the performer Johan Lorbeer has made a name for himself for the most part with his spectacular "still life" performances, which are frequently performed in public spaces. His most famous works are "Proletarian Mural," "Rothko Fax," "In Honor of My Mother" and "Office."

Cornelie Müller, music- and theatermaker and confidential sound adviser, works as a freelance director and producer in the borderland between music and theater. Essential components of her work process involve working closely with actors as well as musicians, structuring the musical and scenic developments into an order of events, and the visual arrangement of the space. Numerous works have been created that allow the spaces to produce sounds and that make music visible. For years now she has been dealing with folk music and regional identities in the field of tension of today's realities.

Jan Lauwers, born in 1957 in Antwerp, studied painting in Ghent and founded the Epigonen Ensemble in Brussels in 1979. This became the Needcompany in 1987, and since then, they have given guest performances on all of the well-known stages and at all of the well-known theater festivals in Europe.

Walid Ra'ad was born in 1967 in Lebanon. His works include text analysis, video, performance and photographic projects. His themes center on the civil wars in Lebanon. He also founded and directs the "Atlas Group," a research institution in Beirut that documents contemporary life in Lebanon. In 2002, Walid Ra'ad participated in the Documenta 2002 in Kassel. He is an assistant professor of media and cultural studies at Queens College, The City University of New York.

Miriam Reeders studied at the Academy of Visual Arts in Maastricht and at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Since 1999, she has been working on various forms of performance, ranging from monologues with music to video experiments to multimedia events. The foundation for her live animations are her own drawings: Comic-like images are lined up and run under a film camera and then projected onto a screen.

The works of the actor and dancer Jan Ritsema and the actress and music professor Bojana Cvejic wander along the borders between performance and "non-performance." In their work they explore for the most part the meaning of the "portrayed subject," its expression, its immediate presence compared to its "representation," and the exchange of the arts.

Susanne Thomas founded her company "Seven Sisters" in 1994. Her project "Trainstation" was not only a hit in the British dance scene, it was also very popular with the authorities at train stations, because it put the travelers at the train stations where it was performed in an extremely good mood. A train station as the focal point is transformed into a space that is temporarily infiltrated by humor, tolerance and compassion.

Teatr Cinema was founded in 1992 by Zbigniew Szumski. Since that time, the company has worked on pieces as "a revolt of the imagination against the routine of reality." The style of Teatr Cinema is characterized by a vibrant poetry between normality and abstraction, inspired by paintings by René Magritte, texts by Samuel Beckett, and art from the Dadaists. Teatr Cinema is considered to be one of the most internationally renowned representatives of the theater scene in Poland.

Jerzy Lukosz, one of the best known contemporary authors and playwrights in Poland, had this to say about the work of Teatr Cinema: "Someone once said that ninety-nine percent of everything that calls itself art is not art at all. If I can say something with certainty, then it is this: The work of Teatr Cinema is part of that one percent the skeptics have reserved for art. Kantor and Marthaler are in good company here."

In 1997, a new star appeared in the theater sky over Poland: Grzegorz Jarzyna. Born in 1968, he became an overnight sensation in the Polish theater scene with his directorial debut "Tropenkoller," which is based on two works by Stanislaw Witkiewicz. He received all of the country's important theater awards in a very short time, and in 1998 he became artistic director of the renowned Teatr Rozmaitosci in Warsaw (today the theater is called "TR Warszawa"). As the representative of his generation of young Polish artists who are no longer forced to work their way past the censors by using ambiguity, the distinguishing characteristics of Jarzyna's theater language are clarity, directness and a magical intensity. The unfathomable films of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino have an influence on his productions.

Along with Robert Lepage, Denis Marleau is considered to be one of the most important theatermakers in Canada. Both of them are from Quebec, whose culture is influenced by both Europe and the United States. The "American" preference for technological finesse and the "European" choice of themes are what make their works so special. Denis Marleau amazed audiences with the rarely performed play "The Blind" by the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck - it is a "technological phantasmagoria." The theatrical installation is the result of his work as an "artist in residence" at the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montreal; the museum grants this position on a regular basis to artists with the understanding that they create an independent work using a combination of equal elements of theater and the visual arts.

Leopold von Verschuer is the director, actor and translator of Theatre Impossible. Theatre Impossible calls itself "the only nonexistent theater in North Rhine-Westphalia," and after its "Non-Founding Ceremony" on 25 September 1998, it performs "when the goal is to make oneself impossible." Theatre Impossible was awarded a prize at the Theaterzwang 2000 festival for its piece "Remscheid Bahnhof oder Wieviel Ohrfeigen verträgt Betty S.?" ("Remscheid Train Station, or How Many Slaps Can Betty S. Take?").