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A crowd in front of the Haus der Berliner Festspiele

© Berliner Festspiele, photo: Fabian Schellhorn

Open Campus

The Theatertreffen’s Open Campus enables student groups to take part in Theatertreffen events and engage in dialogue with artists and the festival team.

Contact

Coordination: Anna Popova
Tel +49 30 254 89 189
opencampus@berlinerfestspiele.de

In the Open Campus programme, students of theatre-related subjects at universities, arts universities and theatre institutes attend selected performances at Theatertreffen and enter into an exchange amongst each other and with the festival artists and team about aesthetic and sociopolitical issues as well as (their own) concepts for the theatre of the future.

Since 2018, school pupils from Berlin have been visiting Theatertreffen in the framework of a workshop that takes places in co-operation with LiteraturInitiative Berlin (LIN), gathering their first experiences as a critical audience. 

History

The Open Campus was launched in 2012. As part of this format, emerging actors, directors, dramaturgs, scenographers and theatre scholars from universities, art academies and theatre institutes from the German-language regions attend the Theatertreffen’s performances and discourse programme. Through workshops and discussions with artists and the festival team, students come into contact with different aesthetics and ways of working.

In 2018, the Open Campus opened up to include school students from Berlin as part of a cooperation with LiteraturInitiative Berlin (LIN). During the 2018 and 2019 festivals, they focussed on one or two selected Theatertreffen events. These visits were complemented by talks with participating artists which were moderated by the students themselves to make sure that the young people’s perspective were at the centre of these talks.

In 2020, the Open Campus had to be cancelled at short notice due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2021, the Open Campus was hosted online. Apart from Zoom-meetings with participants of the selection of ten invited productions, Stückemarkt-authors and the festival team, various online networking options among the various groups of students were provided. In addition, a one-week analogue workshop on New York’s Living Theatre was hosted in cooperation with the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media as part of the festival’s “Focus Living Theatre”. Under the guidance of actors Marcel Kohler and Nils Strunk and in cooperation with the former Living Theatre Member Thomas Walker, eight acting students developed performative acts and reflected on the Living Theatre from today’s perspective.

Since 2021, a workshop programme in performance analysis has been hosted for the students of the Berlin cooperation schools of LiteraturInitiative Berlin. Theatre scientist Torsten Jost guides the students in exploring their own perception in the theatre and in finding out about new perspectives. The students then write down their own impressions in texts, which were published on the Theatertreffen blog until 2024.

Since the 2023 Theatertreffen, there has been an extended exchange between the participants of the Open Campus and the fellows of the International Forum and the Theatertreffen-Blog.

In 2025, for the first time, Theatertreffen offered the students a free visit to a performance. The group was invited to attend the production “Unser Deutschlandmärchen” at the Maxim Gorki Theatre. Afterwards, the impressions of the pupils were published in the Stories format on the Berliner Festspiele website.

Since its inception, an annual intake of between 100 and 150 students from schools and universities have taken part in Theatertreffen’s Open Campus-programme. The Open Campus was founded by Yvonne Büdenhölzer. Anneke Wiesner was the project’s director from 2013 to 2022, Laura Hänel coordinated the Open Campus in 2023 and 2024, and Anna Popova took over in 2025.