In this ‘a play in 100 hours’ course, we work together on a small production of the scandalous play ‘Reigen’ by the writer, playwright and physician Arthur Schnitzler, which was banned from performance for many years because it very explicitly deals with non-marital sexual encounters. Along the way of our exploration, we will not only learn the basics of acting, but also how to deal with dramatic texts in a serious way. We will supplement a deep reading of the play with historical background knowledge on Vienna around 1900, for example on rural-urban migration, on the urban development, on sex, hygiena and contraceptive methods and on Arthur Schnitzler as a person. To objectify our views on the ongoings in the play, we read chapters from publications by the two evolutionary psychologists Geoffrey Miller and David Buss and use this knowledge to build a story that is worth telling. The rehearsal process will include a lot of physical interaction and the building of a personal toolkit on how to build a scene in which humans encounter each other driven by strong forces.
English / Deutsch
Schnitzler’s “Reigen”
“When casting the individual roles and characters, she showed me an enormous knowledge of human nature, even though we had only worked together for a few lessons at that point.”
“When you start working with Anne, it doesn’t feel like work at first. You talk about the play, about the characters, about the background and about what you actually find in it. Then comes the detailed work: Why is my character saying that? How would she say it if she wasn’t sad but angry, if there was a different story inside her? And then the fine-tuning, the precise coordination with the other actors, the technical subtleties. Throughout the whole process with Anne, you never get the feeling that what is being done to turn letters on paper into a whole living piece requires any kind of arduous effort – at least not for the actors, because they are guided through so easily and confidently that it is always fun, no matter how many afternoons you spend rehearsing.”