Johannes Maria Schmit’s 80% seminar

Johannes Maria Schmit’s PhD-project prefigures possibilities of a re-invented director’s theater in a post-disciplinary performing arts field. Working through ethical questions sparked by the asymmetric relation between actor and director, Schmit cross reads contemporary models of consent with the psychoanalytic notion of transference. 

The aim with the thesis is to offer a non-moralizing analysis of the politics that put the director (as auteur) into crisis – and to complement it by a concrete method for consent-based rehearsals. This method insists on intuitive, monopolized authorship as well as the disciplinary division between actor and director in the same radicality as did the so called “Regie-Theater”-tradition; all the while applying strategies of “Verfremdung” to the social relations of the rehearsal space by means of consent-making. 

80% seminar: "Re-inventing Regie-Theater"

1 December

The 80% seminar sets out to trace the mutations of the director’s figure within the candidate’s professional life span. In a foredoomed attempt to map the entire territory, the journey starts out in the heroic mountain range of the German “Regie-Theater”-tradition, rolls down into its foothills (where Schmit graduates from the directing program), and finally comes to rest in the plains of the present; in - as Nicolas Bourriaud has formulated - “an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context.”

In contrast to what Schmit intuits to be post-disciplinary bypasses of asymmetrically distributed power namely the Eastern-European actor-based traditions (Moscow Art Theater, Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble, Grotowskis’s Teaterlaboratorium) get to serve as a blueprint when re-figuring today’s director’s position. In particular the hauntology instituted by Frank Castorf’s Volksbühne is used as a way to analyze the unconscious longings that inform any ambition to “re-invent Regie-Theater”. 

Specific questions in that regard are: does holding on to the disciplinary function of the director offer an opportunity to refuse the “end of history”, the “liquidization” instated by the West after 1989? Can it be used as an antidote to the imperatives of collaboration and relational optimization? Does “rehabilitating asymmetry” thus hold the promise of processes other than the usual homeostatic activity of contemporary theater rehearsals – for both director and actor alike?

Conversation partner/opponent: Christine Korte, PhD, Lecturer at New York University (Campus Berlin) 
Collaborator on “Pre-study #3”: Anders Carlsson, Theater maker and PhD candidate (Göteborg, HSM)
Moderator: Jon Refsdal Moe, Professor in Dramaturgy, SKH and principal supervisor
 

Work demonstration: “Rehabilitating Asymmetry in the Actor-Director-Relation”

30 November

In the work-demonstration Johannes Maria Schmit and his collaborator Anders Carlsson share the research findings of their 4 weeks-practical-endeavor. 
The work-demonstration takes place the day before the actual 80%-seminar and aims to complement it. 

In the start, the participants get shortly introduced to the Wheel of Consent; a therapeutic model drawing on the practical knowledge of body workers, synthesized by chiropractor and “self propelled erotic adventurer” Betty Martin. 
The facilitators Anders and Johannes then transpose the practice into a method for theater rehearsals, gradually embedding it in the actor-director dynamics. 
The newly gained format of rehearsals is then – in a final installment – applied onto the relation between actor and audience. 

Join the Work demonstration?
If you want to join the work demonstration, please send an e-mail to johannesmaria.schmit@uniarts.se with the request saying “registration work demo”.  

Please also note:
In the first half hour, to introduce the Wheel of Consent and its dynamics, we play so called “3-minute games”. These include the touch of hands. 

For more information about the Wheel:
https://bettymartin.org/videos/ 

For more information about the overall PhD project: 
"Situating the director in a theatre of the future"