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 Report INSTED in Hamburg

From 14 till 20 March 2008 INSTED visited the Körber Studio Junge Regie in Hamburg for the second year. Four members of the INSTED crew together with two members from London and one from Maastricht jumped into this week of German theatre.

We had two main goals. Making people enthusiastic about INSTED and spot performances for the international part of the ITs Festival. And of course we really like to see theatre, meet new people and speak with those people about theatre.

The Körber Studio Junge Regie shows performances of every directing school in the German language area (Germany, Austria and Swiss). The festival was founded in 2004 and is hosted by the Thalia Theater. Both directors and actors from ten different schools were present as well as students in theatre critics from München and Hildesheim. Those students wrote a daily newspaper with reviews and articles.

It was a very inspiring week. Most plays we saw were from well-known writers like Schwab, Calderón, Ibsen, Shakespeare, Büchner and Goethe. But the university of Hildesheim sent in a piece of performance-art and winning director Heike M. Götze from Zürich staged a novel from Juli Zeh. All performances were shown on the same stage in the “Gaussstrase”. Besides those performances Late Nights were held, where directing students form Hamburg showed their work on their school stage.

Some plays were exciting, some fun, some old-fashioned, some conceptual, some illustrative and some beautiful. It made clear how much differences there are between directors, their styles and their ideas. But it also made clear that those differences create the possibility to talk about directing and theatre. The organised discussions with the directors, the day after their play was performed, were informative and interesting but the best conversations were those during breaks, dinner, drinks or cigarettes.

All discussions eventually came down to one point: passion. The drive of a director to say something. Something about us, about now. Or, as Lucas de Man was quoted in the festival newspaper: “A director is more than his plays.” (This statement became even truer when some directors appeared to be surprisingly good karaoke singers.)

We met great people, young directors and new members for INSTED. Next year we hope to send more members to this festival. We’ll keep you informed.