The course offers a laboratory for exploring contemporary acting methods through comparative experiential research. We will mainly focus on two major acting methods of the 20th century, those of Augusto Boal and Constantine Stanislavsky. Where Stanislavsky and his followers tend to focus more on "psychology oriented" methods, Boal’s orientation is more social-political focused on the tension between "Game" and "Play" as a technique of individual and collective emancipation.
Augusto Boal is the founder of the activist–therapeutic theatre (Theatre of the Oppressed) and a theoretical and a practical follower of Brecht. The course does not try to choose which of the methods is "right," but to challenge its participants to examine the fundamental theoretical assumptions which lie at the heart of these methods and practices.