Teodora Georgieva / Natalie Baudy

The festival finale deals with the themes of community, intoxication and violence in plays by Bulgarian playwright Teodora Georgieva and German playwright Natalie Baudy, followed by a closing party that guarantees some fun with funky grooves, beats and classics from DJAZ & DJ SAESH (SIS Berlin Collecive & SoRealCrew inkl.)

СИЛНИ. СМЕЛИ. СТРАХОВИТИ. (Stark. Mutig. Furchteinflößend.) by Teodora Georgieva, translated by Alexander Sitzmann

Three ten-year-old boys start an army to stand up to the older boys. But what starts as a children’s game soon turns into a system of power, violence and peer pressure. Over a period of ten years, the play charts how aggression is learned and passed on – and asks if love, care and personal responsibility can offer a way out.

under the influence oder: die rückkehr der bakchen by Natalie Baudy

Three women from three generations meet on the seventh floor of a block of flats as mysterious plagues rain down into their courtyard. Cut-off from the outside world, Ems, Anja and Liselotte drink, and swap stories about their drunken states, relationships and families. When the goddess Dionysa, exhausted by eternal excess, gets rid of the plagues and the alcohol runs out, the women make a radical decision. With dark humour, the play explores dependencies, femininity and solidarity, and the search for ecstasy beyond patriarchal structures.

Read by Banafshe Hourmazdi, Nadim Jarrar, Patrick Khatami, Niklas Wetzel
Directed by Salome Dastmalchi

Followed by an audience discussion with the playwright Natalie Baudy and the Bulgarian curator Gergana Dimitrova, and a closing party with DJAZ & DJ SAESH (SIS Berlin Collecive & SoRealCrew inkl.)

More events at the MEDUSA Festival Berlin

Natalie Baudy is interested in pop-cultural aesthetics, digital phenomena and feminist perspectives in her work. Since the 2024/25 season, she has been a member of the artistic direction team at the schauspiel erlangen. She studied Theatre Studies and Musicology in Mainz, Paris and Berlin, and Dramaturgy at the August Everding Theatre Academy in Munich.

Salome Dastmalchi, born in Berlin, studied Acting at the Bern University of the Arts. In 2010, she made her debut as a writer and director at HAU 3 with Mein Herz ist voller Hass – und das liebe ich (My Heart Is Full of Hate – And I Love It). Since 2012, she has been running acting workshops, including in collaboration with the Schaubühne, the Berliner Ensemble and the TTJ. She also works as a voice artist and has appeared in projects including Iranian Voices. Since 2016, she has been directing regularly for the Junges DT; in 2022, she directed Identitti by Mithu Sanyal for the Staatstheater Darmstadt, for which she was nominated as an emerging artist in the 2022 yearbook of Theater heute. She has been a visiting lecturer at the Berlin University of the Arts.

Teodora Georgieva holds a degree in Theatre Studies from the Krastyo Sarafov National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts, as well as a degree in Education in Mass and Artistic Communications from the University of Sofia. She writes plays for puppet theatre and stage theatre, which have been performed at the Nikolay Binev Youth Theatre, the Sfumato Theatre, and at puppet theatres in Pazardzhik, Yambol and Sliven. Her play Intermediate Zone was nominated for the Askeer Prize for Contemporary Bulgarian Drama in 2023.

Alexander Sitzmann studied Scandinavian and Slavic Studies in Vienna. He now researches and teaches at the University of Vienna. He has worked as a literary translator specialising in poetry and theatre since 1999. Among other works, he has authored two monographs and a dictionary, and has edited several anthologies. In 2004, he was awarded the Honorary Prize by the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture; from 2007 to 2015 and from 2018 to 2025, he was the recipient of the Austrian Federal Ministry’s Translators’ Award; in 2016, he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation; and in 2020, he received the Brücke Berlin Theatre Prize.