International Directing Programme - The Director's Tools

Directing Practice for Theatre Professionals
Artistic Direction Dr Jurij Alschitz

The International Directing Programme offers three modules per year on a regular basis, which can be attended individually in any order.

Upcoming session 2024 – The Director’s Tools - Online

11 February 2024   Introduction
21 – 25 February

This unique hybrid training programme is designed for those who have decided to pursue a directing career, as well as for all directors, theatre educators, actors and playwrights with professional experience, who wish to enhance their practical skills. It is aimed at those who want to learn important secrets of the profession. 

Directors acquire essential knowledge how to develop and implement ideas for a performance, actors how to stage their roles, and theatre teachers how to use the art of directing in their pedagogical work. Here, directing is conveyed in its comprehensive meaning – as a world view, as an art, as a craft and as a tool.

You will go through all the stages of creating a play: from the director’s independent work in preparing the image of the play, its idea, theme, style, etc., work on the text of the play, the laws of stage analysis of the text, the rules of selecting actors, rehearsal methods, etc. You will be given all the basics of the art of directing, which you will then have to develop further on your own. This is a life’s work. In other words, the course gives you a solid starting point for your independent journey into directing.

The Director’s Tools

This course is about the instruments of the director. Talent and imagination need to be realised with professional tools. That is why the director must undertake an in-depth text analysis, as the basis on which to work with actors.

Jurij Alschitz will pose many questions and tasks to the participants and open up the text as a source of energy. What does the composition of a scene, the play, the planned performance look like? Already we come across many compositions: composition of themes, of facts, of events, of atmospheres, of relationships and conflicts…. How do I build the network, the cosmos of events? How do I recognise and deal with open and hidden events? How do the lines of the events of the various characters intersect?

If we take a closer look at the text, we enter the world of words, which follow their own laws. How do the threads of individual words weave themselves across the whole play? How do I prepare the actors for the labyrinth of words? Or is it the pauses? What happens in the empty spaces? Perhaps they are the real carriers of meaning? Does the scenic life take place without words? Where does the meaning emerge without words?

We can look at the text, the play as a musical work – what about rhythm and melodic lines? In which genre do I want to move, how do I want to change and develop it? Which styles do I use and how are they reflected in the overall production?

The questions will multiply during this course – they are the ABC of the professional director, his tools. The individual mastery will be revealed in the finesse of their application.

For all courses of the International Directing Programme in detail, please follow the given link.