ArtsHub’s Jo Pickup is overseas and taking in the best performing arts from around the world at Theater der Welt in Germany.
Sometimes it takes a 14,000 kilometre journey halfway around the world to see some of the best performing arts works from your own backyard.
The Theater Der Welt festival is an esteemed contemporary performing arts festival presented triannually in Germany. This year’s event, held in Chemnitz from 18 June to 5 July 2026, featured over 30 works by international companies, igniting this small German city over the course of the two-week program.
The festival’s 2026 line-up was chosen for the first time by nine international curators – including Australia’s own Melbourne Fringe Festival CEO Simon Abrahams – and the Asia Pacific has been especially well represented. Around a third of this year’s festival is from the region, with artists from Australia (Polyglot), China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Taiwan.
These artists showed what contemporary life – both the personal and the political – looks like in their parts of the world, while also offering a reminder to Australian presenters that building strong ties with our northern-neighbour artists is important work.
Here are three of the stand-out works from the first week of programming that caught ArtsHub‘s attention.
Theater der Welt highlights – quick links
Family Triangle
★★★★★
This beautifully-crafted, sharply-delivered contemporary theatre piece is the collaborative effort of three young Taipei-based theatre-makers, writers and directors – Hung Chien-Han, Hung Wei-Yao and Ray Tseng.
Here, these artists have worked together for the first time to tell the real-life story of an experience they intimately share: the path they followed as a trio to allow two of them to have a child.
The two people at the centre of this pregnancy journey are theatre director Hung Chien-Han and lighting designer Ray Tseng, who are a lesbian couple. A few years ago, when they decided to start a family, they also confronted the limits of Taiwanese law, which, while supportive of same-sex marriage, does not allow same-sex couples to access IVF or any other fertility treatment.
The piece is therefore both deeply personal but also broadly political. It offers audiences a range of entry points through which to consider debates around LGBT rights and the rule of law in relation to those rights, both in Taiwan and in different countries around the world.
In setting the scene for this story, the artists present some rough-cut vox-pop video interviews that give voice to some mainstream views on LGBT rights in Taiwan. These excerpts segue nicely into some equally raw, yet also playful, live-action vignettes that track how the couple decided to ask Chien-Han’s brother (actor/director and the show’s co-creator) Wei-Yao to be the sperm donor for their pregnancy.
Also seen onstage early on (and someone who is present only for the work’s opening scenes) is a sharply-dressed legal representative who outlines the real-life legal contract all three ‘parties’ in this arrangement agreed to sign to formalise their plans.
This lawyer expertly explains how Party A (Chien-Han) will carry the embryo formed with the egg of Party B (Ray) and sperm of Party C (Wei-Yao) to full term as the mother of the child, with Wei-Yao being recognised as the child’s uncle once the child is born.
After giving the audience a little time to digest the details of this plan, the work unfolds as a series of highly imaginative and poignant narrative-driven scenes, which take us far beyond the legal technicalities and political layers of the trio’s journey.
The remainder of the work reveals the nuanced feelings – the nerves, attachment, resolve and, most importantly, love, in its many forms – that these three individuals experience on their way to their hoped-for goal.
Ultimately, Family Triangle feels like a rare gem of a work, and one that will continue to evolve as the real-life couple at the centre of the tale continue along their path to becoming parents – all while contemporary societies across the globe continue charting their own courses around same-sex parenting and LGBT rights.
Family Triangle was presented at the 2026 Theater Der Welt festival in Chemnitz, Germany on 19 and 20 June.
Dear Children, Sincerely… 7 Decades of Sri Lanka
★★★★
Ruwanthie de Chickera, the Artistic Director of Sri Lanka’s Stages Theatre Group, has created a moving piece of theatre that is both memorable history lesson and rare window into the lives of some of Sri Lanka’s oldest citizens, whose memories of the past seven decades provide the throughline of the work.
Structured chronologically and presented in seven short acts, the piece – performed by a cast of around 15 young Sri Lankan actors who were also deeply involved in the work’s long development process – takes us from the almost anticlimactic moment of Sri Lankan independence in 1948 to the end of its three decades-long civil war in 2009.
While the work takes a little time to warm up and find its steady pace, it only continues to build until its final scene – arguably its most powerful thanks in large part to a stunning monologue delivered by performer Shenali Rajkumar. It’s a work that leaves the audience filled with heavy emotions and a great deal to think about and discuss.
Interestingly, in a post-show artist talk about the making of the piece, Chickera revealed that it has not only been audience members who’ve been left with much to talk about, but also the young actors, whose involvement in the project has sparked discussions with family and friends.
As the writer and director described it, many of the events depicted in the play – all taken from interviews with Sri Lankan elders who lived through those times – are nowhere to be found in Sri Lanka’s school textbooks. Thus, in many cases the actors have learnt as much as the audience members about the past seven decades in their home country.
Overall, this work reveals itself to be a hearty, at times joyful ride. But it’s also one that contains delicate layers with coded subtexts, making it both a delight and a poetic reflection of how the past inevitably informs the present, and how that history continues to shape the people who have lived through it.
Stages Theatre Group’s Dear Children, Sincerely… 7 Decades of Sri Lanka was presented at the 2026 Theater Der Welt festival in Chemnitz, Germany on 26 and 27 June.
Stream of Memory
★★★★
Papermoon Puppet Theatre is an Indonesian company that is already well-known to many Australian performing artists, and one that has collaborated with Australian companies like Polyglot Theatre, as well as Creative Australia.
For the past 20 years, Papermoon’s Co-Artistic Directors Maria Tri Sulistyani and Iwan Effendi have brought audiences narrative-driven stories that are also magical dreamscapes, with delicately-crafted puppet characters that are still made by company artists out of the humblest materials, such as papier-mâché, bamboo and fabric.
The company’s latest piece, Stream of Memory, lives up to its name, creating a series of visual impressions that become deeply embedded in the the riverbed of one’s imagination.
The work evokes Indonesians’ long-held respect for, and critical dependence on, their rivers and surrounding seas, and follows a high-spirited young girl called Sang, who one day disappears into the water only to encounter a majestic giant (or god creature) called Kali, whose name means ‘river’ in Indonesian.
Accompanying Kali on an other-worldly, spiritual journey, Sang meets different animals from the land and sea, at times attempting to save them from cruel fates.
Themes of ecological disaster, deforestation, the pollution of waterways, and the exploitation of animals in captivity are explored along the way – all under the watchful, yet serene presence of Kali, with his large all-seeing eyes, moon-shaped face and beautiful, giant hands, which envelop Sang and shield her from the full harshness of these ever-present realities.
The work’s seven performers – Anton Fajri, Beni Sanjaya, Pambo Priyojati, Hardiansyah Yoga, Muhammad Alhaq, Agus Margiyanti and Retno Sulistyorini – handle their multi-sized human and animal puppet characters with great ease and skill, but it’s also nice when some are given chance to perform unencumbered by their whimsical props, giving full life to expressive contemporary dance interludes.
In all, Stream of Memory is both a quiet ode to nature’s preciousness and a gentle reminder of what is sadly disappearing now before our eyes.
Stream of Memory was presented at the 2026 Theater Der Welt festival in Chemnitz, Germany on 19 and 20 June.
