The Federal Cultural Foundation’s Wanderlust Fund supported municipal, state and regional theatres in Germany which yearned to venture out and work together with theatres around the world. The fund, established in 2008, financed theatre partnerships between German and foreign theatres in Europe and faraway countries for two to three seasons. The Federal Cultural Foundation funded 28 international theatre partnerships. As part of their collaboration, theatres developed joint productions, exchanged personnel, shared professional experience and hosted guest performances. The range of productions included traditional dramatic works, dance, music and puppet theatre, youth projects and theatre for preschoolers. Some theatres co-produced a classic, others initiated an international research project, while other theatres commissioned playwrights to produce new plays – it all depended on the theatres’ aesthetic orientation and the themes they wished to explore.

In February 2010 the participating theatres began sharing their impressions of their joint meetings, workshops, guest performances and co-productions in our Wanderlust blog. Each season, three Pfadfinder (scouts) headed out and visited the Wanderlust projects, described the international theatre partnerships and documented these exciting cross-border encounters in texts and images. You can recognise the posts of the Pfadfinder by the little black flag on the right side of the entry.

In our Spotlights we focused on a different topic or debate which was central for the work of our Wanderlust cooperations. The first Spotlight went online in August 2010. You can recognise the Spotlight posts by the little torch on the right side of the entry.

What made the Wanderlust Fund so unique is its variety – a vast array of theatre projects and theatre aesthetics, the stories told on stage and the people who tell them. The Wanderlust blog aimed to capture this diversity. And the entries on this blog are as international as the theatre partnerships themselves. Although the menu headings and introductory texts are in English, our bloggers were free to write in whatever language they felt at home with. Of course, this made the Wanderlust blog an experiment in finding ways to communicate with one another and determining which types of exchange are possible.

In addition to the entries by the Pfadfinder and participating theatres, the Wanderlust blog also included a travel map showing the location of all the theatre partnerships.

With the end of the programme Wanderlust we also closed this blog for new entries and comments. However, the blog will be available online throughout the following year and we hope you enjoy reading through some of the older entries!