Alexander Giesche

Theater director and head of the performance collective GIESCHEand, Alexander Giesche was born in Munich in 1982. He studied at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Gießen and at DasArts in Amsterdam. For “Record of Time,” a collaboration with Lea Letzel, he received the 2011 Critics’ Award at the Körber Studio Junge Regie in Hamburg. From 2012 to 2014, Giesche was artist-in-residence at Theater Bremen. The critics’ survey of “Theater heute” magazine named him “Emerging Director of the Year” in both 2014 and 2016. In 2018, his piece “WHITE OUT – Begegnungen am Ende der Welt” was invited to the Swiss Theatertreffen. His technology-based projects, which oscillate between performance and visual arts, have drawn the attention of international festivals and juries.

Since 2019, Giesche is in-house director at Schauspielhaus Zurich. His visual poem “Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän” (Man in the Holocene), based on Max Frisch’s short story, won the 3Sat prize at Berlin Theatertreffen 2020 and the Nestroy prize in the category “Best German Performance.” His recent work is entitled “AFTERHOUR” and deals with the dawning farewell to the idea of an afterwards.

His interests and work focus on an exploration of the digital realm and modern technology, and the question of how humans can relate to them. When Alexander Giesche works in a theater space, he is not chiefly interested in narrating a plot in the conventional sense. Instead, he often creates landscapes and atmospheres, poetic situations that can move spectators into a different rhythm, and imageries that allow the most mundane things to appear different, strange, beautiful. Aside from performance formats in the strictest sense, Giesche investigates the concept of hospitality, invents situations in which the limit between actors and spectators is dissolved, and the simple fact of being together in the same space at a particular moment itself becomes an artistic event.