About

Richard Pettifer (AUS/GER) is an Australian theatre director, theorist, and critic based in Berlin. 2021-22 he was Artistic Director for Faki Festival, a large-scale free festival for alternative theatrical art in a former factory of Zagreb, Croatia. As a critic he has been an author for Berlin-based tanszschreiber.de since August 2022, and is published in online magazines such as Sirp (EST), Arterritory (LVA), Arta (ROU), and Artslant (USA) and an invited guest critic to Latvian Theatre Showcase 2018 and DRAAMA Festival Estonia. He has led workshops on critical writing and Theatre of the Oppressed in Ukraine, Serbia, and London. In 2013 he attempted travel between Australia and Germany without flying, performing the anti-oppression work People Spoke and residencies in Indonesia, India, Iran, Turkey, and Romania. He has toured independently in the UK (End of Species, 2014), Romania/Serbia/Croatia (The Croatian Climate Change of Indonesia, 2015), and has collaborated with government institutions on works for the UN’s COP 21 in Bonn, Germany (Stay, 2017).

His works often approach the subject of climate change and technology as key battlegrounds for the ethics of human intervention, seeking a re-centring of ‘the human’ as a collective social being in a context where misanthropy, individualism, alienation, and cynicism are the dominant cultural traits. His works often aspire to a global collective theatre that activates spaces for social change through cross-cultural collaboration, cultural theory, philosophy and art-activism, advocating anti-oppression through models of culture-building and direct intervention, and emphasising a critical perspective on our complicity with global capitalist systems of exploitation and disempowerment.

Since 2018, he has been director and lead librettist of the opera project My Data and Me: Una Storia d’Amore, an epic opera devised in collaboration with composer Tomasz Prasqual with the HUMAINT team of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC).

His contribution “The Artist is Absent: Non-Human Agency and Superhumanism in the Situation of the Theatre” was published in the University of Tartu’s journal Methis in Summer, 2021. He has also published theory in Symbolon (University of Arts, Targu Mures).

Since March 2022, he is supporting organiser for Cultural Workers Studio in Flutgraben e.V., a studio for Cultural Workers fleeing the 2022- invasion of Ukraine.

Richardpettifer.blogspot.com

Theaterstuck.blogspot.de