PEDAGOGICKO-TVORIVÁ METÓDA THOMASA OSTERMEIERA

How does an actor become the creator of his own art, rather than performer of the stage director’s instructions? What are the creative sources he can call upon? And what are the tools of a stage director (pedagogue), willing to guide his (student) actors to an autonomous creative process? For the sake of finding answers to these questions Thomas Ostermeier has developed a specific working process that rests on the Brechtian inductive method, but it also contains a variation of many elements of Stanislavsky’s system and of Meyerhold’s legacy. The stage director’s objective, while employing this method, is, in his own words “not to direct at all, not to dictate, not to order, prescribe, tell or instruct” but quite the contrary “to delegate [his] work to actors, to their art, to their imagination, and to their expertise”. The paper not only aims at describing this method, but also at reflecting its concrete application during a workshop led by Ostermeier, the target group being the students of DAMU in Prague.