Theatre as a Practical Philosophy of Human Action

This course is for theatre practitioners who want to clarify their understanding of what we do when we make theatre. It introduces Western theatre as a complex system that can be described by principles. It attempts to offer a model that can be used as a solid ground to work on in practice, replacing vast sets of often confusing and contradictory occasion-based rules. The course pursuits a possible unity of knowledge and does that in five steps:

1. We start with a description of the practice and a naming of principles.
2. We look at these principles with some insights from the behavioural, neuro- and cognitive sciences.
3. We move into theatre history, technically looking at the changes some of the principles underwent over time.
4. We introduce ourselves to the work of three playwrights: Sophocles, Shakespeare and Schnitzler and see how their particular “Menschenbild” actually interacts with the principles.
5. We slowly re-approach practice by integrating the works of directors like Gordon Craig, Stanislavski and Brecht into the model, which also includes the work of the actors who were shaped by their ideas.

I will make the claim that Western theatre can contribute its part to a functioning society, entertainingly creating sufficiently overlapping and sufficiently differing individual understandings of what we humans are, how we can understand ourselves and others, what we can know and what gets our attention and is therefore considered as of value.

The course will take place as dialogue teaching. In the sense of an elastic curriculum there will be a slim obligatory reading list and a bigger voluntary one for those with deeper interest.

As the course is a first attempt of teaching this matter, it is free of charge.