International Workshop of Performing Arts – La Biennale di Venezia
Laboratorio Internazionale di Arti Sceniche
with Thomas Ostermeier – Artistic Director of Berlin’s Schaubühne
“Playing and performing “Hamlet” – Approaching classical drama as performer and actor”
by open competition
La Biennale – Teatro Piccolo Arsenale – Venice
Dec. 2010
“Hamlet is a play about theatre. Everybody is constantly playing a role, is constantly finding himself in a theatrical situation and has constantly to hide behind a mask out of different reasons, mostly because he or she is threatened by political power.
Elizabethan theatre is to be considered as another form of epic theatre.
Where does epic theatre meet modern performance? How to involve new media as a tool to combine the epic idea of theatre with a more performance orientated acting?
The participating actors of the workshop will work on the characters of Hamlet and Ophelia.”
Some of the actors selected for the workshop were then cast in Thomas Ostermeier’s “Death in Venice” for the 41st International Theatre Festival at La Biennale di Venezia the following year (cf. “Death in Venice”)