The Body as an Argument

"I got punched in the face. My nose was broken. The bones of the bridge got shifted. The flesh swelled like it was trying to hide the fracture beneath. This is how speech swells around memory. How intellect swells around hurt." Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

With its sharp tip, the broken bone can become a writing pen. Unlike uninjured skin, when skin is cut or broken, it becomes a map. Following its lines will often lead to unsolved discourses, open questions, forgotten genealogies and erased histories.    In "The Body as an Argument", we will focus on the syntax of the layers, voices and perspectives that make up a body - a text - and ask: what is, actually, the body of the writer, of the theatre writer? How does this body transform to become a stage, the very place from which it's normally absent? What is the anatomy of a stage? How do we incorporate its physicality, its performativity, into our writing? How do we include the particular presence of the theatre auditorium/ the theatre institution/ the audience into the shaping of our texts?
The writer's body transforms into a page. The page shapeshifts into a stage and is being divided between a multitude of bodies, putting it in a constant state of transition. It morphs with space, it transforms with time, it mutates with each place where it's staged, with every important political event. How to integrate this fluidity, this 'transitionality' in the writing process, in the sealed form of the "finished" play? What is a finished play?  

Preparatory tasks will be shared on this page in mid-August.

The language of the Seminar will be English (maybe a little bit of German).

There are two seminar blocks, each 11:00-16:00:

Thu 3.11.
Fri 4.11.
Mon 7.11.

and

Wed 30.11.
Thu 1.12.
Fri 2.12.