Theatre as a Practical Philosophy of Human Action

This course is for actors, directors and all other theatre practitioners who want to broaden, deepen and clarify their understanding of what we do when we make theatre and who want to put their understanding on a level that is coherent with high knowledge standards of our time.

I introduce Western theatre as a human system that can be described by definable principles and empirically observable reoccuring parameters. I offer a theoretical model of theatre that originates from an ongoing interrogation of practice, and 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 draws from a broad field of data, starting with a basic description of the practice and a naming of principles and parameters, then looking at these parameters on the level of current insights from the behavioural, neuro- and cognitive sciences, from there moving into theatre history, then diving into the scriptures of Western theatre, namely the works of our greatest playwrights from Sophocles over Shakespeare to Schnitzler, and from there slowly re-approaching practice by integrating the works of directors and actors like Gordon Craig, Stanislavski and Brecht into the model. The course pursuits consilience as a possible unity of knowledge based on reality and submits to the knowledge hierachies of the sciences. A basic understanding of the mathematical concepts of information, entropy, feedback systems and a probabilistic understanding of individual, shared and negotiated perception and meaning will be necessary, but can be achieved within the course and without the requirement of above average math skills.

I will argue that Western theatre is, simply by the way it developed from how human social perception and action work, deeply nested in overall constituents of Western culture like curiosity, dialogue, story, shared observation, negotiation, evidence, creation, genius, beauty, the tension between the individual and the collective, claim vs action/ deed, freedom of speech, profound scripture, authority and hierarchies as well as their motility, epistemic humility, slow judgement, mastery, competition, market and, above all, play, entertainment and fun. I will also make the claim that Western theatre can contribute its part to a functioning society on the level of a polis, if its parameters are kept functioning and are not distorted by top down interventions. By letting the audience “vote with the feet” it can contribute to ongoingly recalibrating the “everyday epistemics of the populos” called human judgement, hereby creating sufficiently overlapping and sufficiently differing individual understandings of what we humans are, how we can understand ourselves and others, what we can know, what is of value and therefore of interest and how we can live and live with each other.

The course is, as all other Human Acting courses, development of thought in the process of dialogue teaching and not a ready-made class.

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