Brave New Voices

Discourse

24.8.-14.9.2025

Jahrhunderthalle Bochum

International voices from literature and discourse.

What is our common ground in a changing world? And how do we start to discuss? Brave New Voices opens the space for prominent speakers from the arts, science and politics. Post-growth and loneliness, algorithms and droughts, war and lyricism – in the poetic refuge of Bochum’s Jahrhunderthalle, multiple award-winning playwright Sivan Ben Yishai meets with current voices from socio-political discourses. Literary interventions open up exciting spaces of discourse for an interdisciplinary exchange on the burning issues of our time. Theory meets artistic practice. How can the future be imagined as a place for which we long?

Sivan Ben Yishai (Moderation)

Sivan Ben Yshai, born in Tel Aviv in 1978, is an Israeli playwright and theater director. She has lived in Berlin since 2012. Her plays have been performed at the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, Nationaltheater Mannheim, Münchner Kammerspiele and in Helsinki, Luxembourg, Tel Aviv and New York City. In 2019, Sivan Ben Yishai was in-house playwright at the Nationaltheater Mannheim. In 2022, she was awarded the Mülheim Playwriting Prize for Wounds Are Forever (Self-Portrait as a National Poet) and was selected as Playwright of the Year 2022 by Theater heute. In 2022 and 2023, her plays were invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen. Her plays have been published both in German and in the original (English) by Suhrkamp Theaterverlag since 2017. In 2023 she was awarded the Berlin Theater Prize. According to the jury, the playwright “appeared in the firmament of German-language theater like a comet”; this was the first time the prize was awarded to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to German-language theater without writing in German. In 2024, she won the Mülheim Drama Prize for the second time.