Hannah Schassner, born in 1988 in the Odenwald and grew up in Adelsheim, Germany, is a freelance theatre-maker from Frankfurt am Main. Hannah studied theatre, film and media science, German literature science and art history in Frankfurt and Vienna. Since 2011 she has been working in different fields of theatre, namely in directing, writing and theatre education – even though she absolutely hates the word ”education”. 

During the course of her studies, she had been concerned with the (political) effects of art, in particular, with the effect of comedy in the performing arts. Her current line of inquiry continues to investigate this theoretical interest through her own artistic practice.

In part I of the conversation, we discuss her obsessions and whims in equal measure but almost always through the lens of the theatre-obsessed-maker. Some of her critically acclaimed works like Kleine Leute, Heilig Blute, and Issa versus Illegal attempt to reveal the state of the discourse on Faith, Racism and Migration.

On different senses of humour -

“….when the audience starts laughing about people - Ha ha ha, he’s so stupid, and the audience ends with crying about themselves. That was actually the thesis. [It’s a kind of a] strategy, so I used the Master’s thesis to analyse a humour strategy which would be political in more artistic or in a more clever way than just being satire, for example or parody. That its always actually about the moment where you feel like, I want to laugh but I can’t anymore and when I laugh, I don’t laugh about the figures anymore, I laugh about myself because I am not able to find my place here anymore.”

Hannah's primary venues in Frankfurt are Landungsbrücken and Theaterperipherie.