Meet the team

Gerhardt Haag / Artistic Director africologne

Born in 1949; from 1970 to 1973 he trained as an actor at the Max Reinhardt School (now UdK) in what was then West Berlin. His first theater production was with George Tabori in 1972. After his training, he worked for four years at various municipal theaters (Giesen and Mainz). After three years of theater pedagogical work, he founded the Freie Werkstatt Theater in Cologne together with several colleagues in 1981, where he worked as a collective director until 1986. During this time, he directed, among other things, a German-Turkish theater project on the issue of forced marriages of Turkish girls (1982): Nein/Hayir.

From 1986 to 1995, Gerhardt Haag worked freelance at various theaters and as a speaker. He initiated a German-Arabic theater project on the question of the emigration of young people from the Maghreb to Europe (1994/95): Hanîn/Sehnsucht, which also toured Morocco. In 1995, he took over as director of the Theater im Bauturm – Freies Schauspiel Köln, a position he held until the end of the 2015/16 season. He was awarded the Cologne Theater Prize in 1991, 1996 and 2004. Since 1998, he has attended numerous festivals in the fields of theater/dance/film, primarily in West Africa (Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, etc.). In 2010/11, together with Etienne Minoungou from the Récréâtrales Festival in Ouagadougou and Kerstin Ortmeier, he developed the idea and basis for the biennial africologneFESTIVAL. In December 2013, he was awarded the Cologne Honorary Theater Prize as one of the formative personalities of independent theater.