Playwrights’ Workshop at the Stückemarkt 2009

The Nominations

The jury invited five authors to take part in the playwright’s workshop:

Nina Büttner, Berlin: “Self-​activating”
Davide Carnevali, Berlin/Barcelona/Milan: “Variazioni sul modello di Kraepelin – Variations on the Kraepelin model” (German translation by Sabine Heymann)
Ursula Knoll, Vienna: “the path to happiness”
Stephan Lack, Vienna: “Pelican Island”
Charlotte Roos, Hanover: “Hens.Hawks”

Head: John von Düffel

Learning Objective: Discover Yourself

“Will you do the same workshop again?” After five years of playwrights' workshops at the Stückemarkt, the question seems justified. But the answer is a clear no. No two workshops are the same, and not just because the setting has often changed, from the talent ship to the talent mobile to the canteen garden at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele and so on. No, no two workshops are the same because the talents are different. And there is no other method than that of engaging with these young or emerging writers, who are not only participants in the workshop, but in the best case also its outcome. For there is no learning objective other than exploring and testing the specific quality, stubbornness and interest of these playwrights, who have been selected from hundreds of submissions to be discovered, by others, of course, but above all by themselves. In this respect, the workshop is there for the talents and not the other way round. Their work takes centre stage and not the methods and measures of the workshop leader, which also makes this workshop unique.

The public presentation of the excerpts and scenes worked on under the motto “Here and Now – What Crisis?” will also be completely different this year. After several variations and versions with reading authors, amateurs and drama students in staged workshop formats, well-known actors will now read the texts of the tt Talents for the first time, without any rehearsal, without any staging, in the sense of a first encounter between actors and text - that, too, of course, is unique.

John von Düffel Author and dramaturg
Director of the Stückemarkt playwrights’ workshop since 2004