Yana Ross

Yana Ross is a cosmopolitan nomad. In her work for the theatre, she reworks radical pieces that are now viewed as classics, and reflects them sensitively yet irreverently using stories of the city and the personal biographies of the actors involved. Taking canonical texts such as Chekhov’s Three Sisters and The Seagull, Ibsen’s Nora or Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, she strips them to their bourgeois core and simultaneously shows the astonishing relevance of these texts to our present day by connecting them directly to the language and rituals of the specific society she is staging them for. She has the astute, dissecting gaze of an outsider who is not part of any specific community. In 2008, Yana Ross was the first woman to direct a play on the main stage of the Berlin Volksbühne. She became known to a wider audience in the German­speaking theatre world in 2016 at the Wiener Festwochen, with her staging of Wunschkonzert by Franz Xaver Kroetz, in which the famous Polish actress Danuta Stenka, who will now be a new addition to the Schauspielhaus Zürich ensemble, stands silently on stage for 80 minutes. Just before joining the Schauspielhaus Zürich, she was the resident director at the Lithuanian National Theatre, where she most recently, in the spring of 2019, directed Ödön von Horváth’s Tales from the Vienna Woods.