Next year, the non-profit association »Mortier Awards« will present the Mortier Next Generation Award, worth € 30,000, for the third time and support a project in keeping with the spirit of Gerard Mortier, great innovator and visionary of the theatre.

The Mortier Next Generation Award is presented every two years. It is awarded to support projects by artists who are at the start of their career and show exceptional talent. The award is endowed with € 30,000. The Mortier Next Generation Award includes a short-term fellowship of several months at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Berlin Institute of Advanced Study), which, each academic year, offers residencies to an interdisciplinary group of scientists and artists.

Only natural persons who have not yet reached the age of 35 are entitled to apply for the Mortier Next Generation Award. Applications can be submitted until 31 March 31 2023 – exclusively via email: mortier-awards@gmx.at. All applications are to include a description and a budget overview which details the costs involved in the implementation of the submitted project. The description should not exceed 6,000 characters. It is possible to attach photos, sketches, videos or similar materials (large files please via WeTransfer).

The decision on the award will be made by an independent jury in May 2023.

For more than three decades, Gerard Mortier headed renowned opera houses (La Monnaie, Brussels; Opéra national de Paris; Teatro Real, Madrid) and festivals (Salzburg Festival; Ruhrtriennale). Born on 25 November 1943 in Ghent, Mortier throughout his career pusued the art form of opera not only at the heart of artistic debates, but also at the centre of socio-political discourse. His programming choices were nourished by the conviction that opera as an art form should address socially relevant questions – and he invariably located his music theatre projects within their social and topographical surroundings: whether in Brussels, in Salzburg, at the Ruhrtriennale, in Paris or finally in Madrid

»Making theatre means breaking daily routines, questioning the acceptance of economic, political and military violence as the normal state of affairs, awakening communities to questions of human existence which cannot be regulated via laws, and affirming that the world can be better than it is. Creating theatre, then, is a mission, almost a sacred office, without the need for religious revelation. Theatre is a human religion«, he noted in his programmatic book Dramaturgie einer Leidenschaft.