A cow stands in a field. A deer moves through a forest. Neither speaks. Neither needs to. The sounds of their bodies — breath, hoof on earth, the wet noise of eating — become the entire architecture of a theatrical work. No dialogue, no text, no human language at all. This is Cow | Deer, one of two productions Katie Mitchell is bringing to Berlin this April as the Artist in Focus at the Schaubühne's Festival International New Drama. The question it poses is not subtle: what kind of attention do we owe to non-human life, and can theatre — that most logocentric of art forms — actually deliver it?

It is a strange and deliberately confrontational proposition: a director celebrated for her forensic deconstructions of literary texts — Virginia Woolf, Chekhov, the European canon — choosing to abandon language entirely. Mitchell, who has spent decades proving that live video, split-screen staging, and meticulous choreography can crack open a novel like a surgeon opens a chest, now asks an audience to sit with animal sounds for the duration of a performance. Co-created with Nina Segal and Melanie Wilson, the piece dispenses with words entirely, using sounds and noises to narrate a day in the life of animals. But the provocation cuts deeper than formal experiment. At a festival that simultaneously programmes documentary testimony from Mediterranean rescue workers, Mitchell's wordless animal piece asks a question that shadows the entire programme: what happens when theatre tries to represent beings — animals, migrants — who cannot represent themselves in the language of the institution that stages them?

Mitchell's relationship with the Schaubühne stretches back over a decade. Her production of Orlando, adapted by Alice Birch from Virginia Woolf's novel, remains in the theatre's repertoire and will screen again during FIND. That production crystallised something essential about Mitchell's method: the use of live-camera relay to fracture narrative perspective, to show the labour of theatrical illusion in real time while still conjuring genuine feeling. A queer biography spanning four centuries, staged with the precision of a film set and the liveness of a panic attack. In a camera-assisted Mitchell production, you watch an actor perform a close-up into a lens while, on a screen above, the same moment reads as cinema — the double exposure of process and product becomes the meaning. The Schaubühne's convertible building on Lehniner Platz — originally Erich Mendelsohn's Universum cinema, now housing stages that can merge or separate behind sliding panels — has always been a natural home for this kind of spatial restlessness.

FIND has a longer pedigree than many of Berlin's more photogenic cultural fixtures. The festival has run at the Schaubühne since Thomas Ostermeier took over as artistic director in 1999, and has evolved into what is arguably the continent's most serious annual survey of new theatre — a curated programme that favours directors who treat the stage as a site of formal invention rather than narrative delivery. Mitchell fits this company precisely, though her work carries a distinctly British tension between radical form and emotional rigour that sets it apart from the more overtly provocative European tradition.

The other Mitchell piece travelling to Berlin is Bluets, her adaptation of Maggie Nelson's slim, devastating book about colour, heartbreak, and philosophy. Adapted by Margaret Perry, it arrives at FIND via the Royal Court Theatre. Nelson's book is not obviously theatrical — it is a series of numbered propositions about the colour blue, threaded through with references to Goethe's colour theory, Mallarmé, and the author's own sexual and emotional history. That Mitchell chose this as material is revealing. Her career has been a sustained argument that the stage can do things with interiority that cinema cannot, precisely because the audience watches the machinery of representation at the same time as the representation itself. Where a film of Bluets would have to choose between illustrating Nelson's propositions or simply reciting them, Mitchell's method can hold both registers simultaneously — the text spoken, the image constructed before your eyes, the gap between them becoming the space where the audience thinks. A text as fragmented and essayistic as Nelson's demands exactly this kind of double vision.

Beyond Mitchell, the 2026 programme maps a geography of contemporary theatrical concern. Robert Lepage's Needles and Opium interweaves a Québécois man's heartbreak in a Paris hotel room with the parallel addictions of Jean Cocteau and Miles Davis. Lepage, who recently directed Glaube, Geld, Krieg und Liebe at the Schaubühne, is a maximalist where Mitchell is a miniaturist, but they share an obsession with how live performance can layer time and space in ways that recorded media cannot. With meticulous precision, the piece relates Cocteau's fascination and disillusionment during his 1949 trip to New York and Davis's concurrent stay in Paris — two transatlantic crossings, two forms of dependency, one revolving set. The Italian documentary theatre collective Kepler-452 returns with A place of safety, a piece built from field research aboard a Mediterranean search-and-rescue vessel.

The full programme spans companies and artists from Brazil, Canada, Greece, the UK, Italy, and Norway. That geographic spread is characteristically FIND — shaped by curatorial relationships built over years rather than by checklist diversity. The Schaubühne has always operated with one foot in the German civic theatre tradition and one foot in a more international, festival-circuit mode, and FIND is where the second foot lands hardest.

What makes this particular edition feel charged is the convergence of Mitchell's formal trajectory with the festival's wider preoccupations. A director who has spent her career finding new ways to stage the literary and the psychological now turns to the non-verbal and the non-human. The distance between Cow | Deer and A place of safety is vast in subject and method, but both works push against the same limit: how does a representational art form account for experience that exists outside its representational grammar? This is not a new question for performance, but it gains urgency in a cultural moment where empathy as a political tool is under sustained scrutiny — where the claim "I can imagine your suffering" has started to sound less like solidarity and more like appropriation.

Mitchell's work has been described so often as "an innovative interlinking of acting, scenography and live video" that the phrase has calcified into shorthand — it appears in virtually identical form across the Schaubühne's own materials and dozens of secondary sources, describing reputation more than work. The more interesting thing about FIND 2026 is that the artist being celebrated seems to be moving beyond that description. A wordless piece about animals does not need live-camera relay. It needs something else — perhaps a willingness to let the medium fail, to see what remains when the signature technique is removed. Ten days in a building designed so that three separate performances can happen simultaneously, or the walls can open and everything becomes one room. The question is whether, when the walls open, anyone has found something to say that the architecture alone cannot.