Studies
Education
Do we need theatre? Is art really essential to human existence? How would reality feel if we cut out the dreaming, playing, fiction, phantasy, reflexion, the shared experience? How real would we be then?
ADK teaches theatre by acting, producing, trying out and engaging. It stands for the courage to face new challenges through an art form that dates back thousands of years. It stands for the need to confront our past and above all our complex present. It believes in giving people and itself space.
Adrienne Goehler, who took part in our symposium »Art.Culture.Sustainability«, held to mark ADK’s 10th anniversary, writes that sustainability is impossible without aesthetics. In other words, art plays a decisive role in how we shape the social fabric. And there lies the enormous responsibility we all bear when we choose to work in the theatre and to make performing art our tool for communicating with people.
Theatre and art appeal to the senses. They create a shared space for experience where exploring social patterns and structures generates insights and helps us to understand. But just as the world is constantly changing, so too theatre is engaged in a constant quest for new techniques, content and narratives. Today’s actors, directors, dramaturgs, and stage and costume designers must be equipped to handle much more than the traditional civic or national theatres with their standard repertoire. Awaiting them out there is a huge, free production market where there are few boundaries.
That is why training for the performing arts covers a broad spectrum: students must both acquire the crafts and professional skills to meet the demands of their chosen discipline, and at the same time respond to the diversity of a genre that is constantly expanding. At the heart of this quest is the authorial stance of the actor or director. The goal of our teaching is to develop artists and dramaturgs who have their own opinions, can take their own decisions and approach what they do with confidence.
You will come across different directors, well-known and unknown writers, texts and rhizomes, music, dance, film and media art, fine art and political issues; you will also encounter unbending executives and managers, brilliant but exhausting, even maddening colleagues, great classical minds but also rebels and illusionists, realism and surrealism, the trendy and the anachronistic, and of course, again and again, the audience – inquisitive, rapturous or hostile. You will be confronted with worlds of every shape and size and called upon to convey them to the senses, reflect them, create an artistically charged, haptic experience out of them and interpret them aesthetically – always to the highest standards. Training for the theatre of our day will be your opportunity to acquire vital practical insights, develop talents, perfect your skills and hone your techniques. It will allow you to fail and pick yourself up again. It will enable you to search for the impossible and put it into practice.
The campus in Ludwigsburg provides a unique opportunity for this broad-based training thanks to lively cooperation with its other residents, the Film Academy, its Institute of Animation and the Atelier Ludwigsburg-Paris, not to mention Stuttgart’s Academy of Art and Design and the University of Education. Interdisciplinary and project-based collaboration is central to this course and encourages the early formation of artistic partnerships. Close links with theatres and cultural institutions nearby expand this potential and permit an abundance of practical experience. It is crucial for students to come into contact with the diversity and particularities of different types of theatre and artistic expression if they are to experience the stage as a place where social processes are dissected, analysed and exposed, and where utopias can be invented and acted out. By sharpening our critical gaze, we drill down to the core of human life: fathoming the world in all its complexity, variety, nuances, depths, imponderables and marvels, and presenting these with resources befitting our times – telling stories about what was, is and might yet be.
Above all it takes curiosity, exposing yourself to the unknown with an open mind. Acknowledging, enduring, evaluating, carrying on as you founder, grapple, succeed – and maintaining your stance as you state and show what your art inevitably demands.
