Draft:Fabiane Kemmann

Fabiane Kemmann

Fabiane Kemmann lives and works as a director and writer in Berlin.

Life and work

Kemmann grew up in Bergisches Land near Cologne. She studied theater and literature at the Free University of Berlin with Joachim Fiebach and poetics and poetry at the Gorky Institute of World Literature, while learning with the directors Dimiter Gotscheff, Barbara Nicolier, and Martin Wuttke.

Specializing in theater at the intersection with music, she has staged several works at the Berliner Philharmonie, the Meyerhold Center in Moscow, and in exceptional public venues.

Kemmann directed the first restaging of Bertolt Brecht's and Hanns Eislers musical theater piece The decision in its original form with 300 choristers since the 1930s in the Berliner Philharmonie, which she produced and staged in 2016 as part of a collaboration with Barbara Nicolier. The world premiere of Sergei Mikhailovich Tretyakov's Russian translation of the play, titled Высшая Мера (“Highest Measure”), she brought to the stage at the Meyerhold Center in Moscow in 2018.

Among her further outstanding productions is Eisler / Prokoll I, which took place on stage live and simultaneously in Berlin and Moscow in 2021. More than 200 participants acted and sang with each other across borders. It was followed by the premiere of the international production Eisler / Prokoll II at the Berliner Philharmonie in 2022 and the multidisciplinary staging of her poem Hieroglyph within the hybrid production Syntax in Space in 2024.

Fabiane Kemmann has been writing for local and international newspapers such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and The Ghanaian Chronicle in Accra since before her studies, later for Moscow German Newspaper. Her first work as a writer was the commissioned piece Bruchstücke for the Deutsches Theater. Here she portrayed the female counterpart to the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's story in monologue form, A gentle creature. The play was staged at the Deutsches Theater in the Box (2009).

Fabiane Kemmann founded the non-profit association Lysius e. V., which aims to interweave performance cultures. She has been awarded scholarships by the Academy of Arts, VG Wort, DAAD, Senate of Berlin, and the Literary Colloquium Berlin, among others. Lectures have taken her to the University of Leipzig, the Russian State University for the humanities, and the Tchaikovsky Conservatory.

Selected works

• 2016 Die Maßnahme, Philharmonie Berlin

• 2018 Высшая мера, Meyerhold Zentrum Moskau

• 2021 EISLER / PROKOLL I, Moskau/Berlin

• 2022 EISLER / PROKOLL II, Philharmonie Berlin

• 2023/24 Syntax in Space

Selected publications

• 2000-2018 Kemmann, Fabiane: Publications in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (abbreviation kemm), The Ghanaian Chronicle, Freitag, Moskauer Deutsche Zeitung and others.

• 2009 Kemmann, Fabiane: Bruchstücke, commissioned work for the Deutsches Theater, world premiere in cooperation with Thomas Freyer's Die Interimsliebenden (play)

• 2022 Prokoll: Path of October. Theater cantata in 3 parts to 27 poems of the Russian Revolution. (Путь Октября. Музыкальное действие в трех звеньях). Translated from Russian into German by Fabiane Kemmann. Publication: Berliner Philharmonie. (Libretto unpublished)

• 2022 Stimmen der Massnahme, in RUSSEN / BRECHT, Verbrecher Verlag Berlin ISBN 978-3-95732-523-5

• 2023 Serge, Victor: Confession. Translated from Russian into German by Fabiane Kemmann. In: ecibs, Magazine of the International Brecht Society. (Poetry translation)

• 2023/24 Kemmann, Fabiane: Hieroglyph. Translated from German into English by Ann Cotten. (Audiovisual app, poetry)