Break the structure! That’s what art is about

Happy Birthday, Judith Malina!

Exactly 100 years ago, the future founder of the Living Theatre was born in Kiel, the daughter of a rabbi and an actress. Whilst in exile in New York, she launched her global project – a fusion of art and political activism – alongside Julian Beck. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the Living Theatre was world-famous. Countless political artists owe it a debt of gratitude for its utopian and aesthetic inspiration. With her project, Judith Malina was a pioneer of participatory theatre. With her legendary Antigone from 1967, the scandal-ridden theatrical ritual Paradise Now, and countless street theatre performances that engaged with the audience and its concerns, the Living Theatre rewrote the history of theatre. Theatre as a bastion of resistance and a social laboratory: what Erwin Piscator had begun at the Volksbühne in the early 20th century, his pupil Judith Malina carried out into the world with the Living Theatre.

What does political activism have to say to us today?
How can utopia even be conceived?

Panel with biographer Anna Opel (NOW! Judith Malina und das Living Theatre, AvivA Verlag 2026), former member and documentary filmmaker Dirk Szuzies, and footage from the documentary “Your whole life is a rehearsal” by the Italian theatre group Motus, hosted by journalist Sophie Diesselhorst.

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