; Study Programmes
The Theatre Studies department at the Institute for Theatre, Film and Media Studies at the Goethe University offers two M.A. programmes in Dramaturgy in cooperation with the Hessian Theatre Acadamy (HTA):
M.A. Dramaturgy
The M.A. Dramaturgy was founded in 2002 and offers a full university course in Frankfurt that combines theory and practice.
M.A. CDPR
The international study programme Comparative Dramaturgy and Performance Research offers studying both at Goethe University in Frankfurt and at one of currently four international higher education institutions and leads to a Double Degree.
Dramaturgy as Political Practice
We understand “Dramaturgy” as a political practice. Dramaturgy can open the creative process – the artwork in progress – where it threatens to refuse the demands of the constitutively excluded Others. Dramaturgy remembers, that conflict is key for every theatre and opposes its ‘extorted reconciliation’ (Adorno). With dramaturgy, we can negotiate the question of who is allowed to take up space and perform on stage and who isn’t again and again. The vanishing point of every political dramaturgy is that impossible theatre that negates the present as the realm of possibilities: In the interest of a different theatre or perhaps of something completely different from what we call theatre today.
Hölderlin Lectures 2025/26
For this semester’s Hölderlin lectures on general and comparative theatre studies, we are expecting two outstanding literary scholars and philosophers from Northwestern University in Evanston, who will speak on Benjamin and Hölderlin in their lectures and also lead workshops on Benjamin and Nietzsche: Peter Fenves will be our guest on 11 November 2025, and Samuel Weber on 3 February 2026.
More detailed information will follow.
Jour Fixe
We invite you to our Jour fixe on 10 December at 7 p.m. on our rehearsal stage, where we will welcome Sahar Rahimi and Marc Schröppel, the new directors of the Brecht Festival Augsburg.
As guest lecturers in the arts and sciences, we will be welcoming the performance and dance duo deufert&plischke in the winter semester, who will be working with students on the future of municipal theatre in the form of a scenic project that will prepare an action to be presented to the public in the summer semester: Faced with the task of “social-ecological transformation”, must municipal theatres reinvent themselves in light of changing demographic compositions in cities and the challenges of global warming and associated climate change in order to fulfil their old purpose, defined by the Age of Enlightenment? What might that look like? As part of the project, letters from a wide variety of actors will be generated and collected, to be addressed to the future municipal theatre. Deufert&Plischke will help us develop this campaign on the basis of their corresponding collection of letters to dance in their scenic project. A presentation of the collaboration is planned for 5 November 2025 at 6 p.m. as part of another Jour fixe.
Symposium/Masterclass
The symposium and masterclass ‘Recourse. Expand. Correct. On the art of recording theatre, dance and performance (AT)’ is expected to take place from 12 to 14 February. The plan is to invite several artistic and academic guests, with whom space will also be given to the presentation of student contributions in the context of artistic interventions, showings and installations. (In connection with Nikolaus Müller-Schöll’s seminar ‘The Art of Recording (Theatre)’.
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Master’s programmes in Dramaturgy and CDPR:
Jour Fixe
The Jour fixe invites students of the Hessen Theatre Academy to take part in discussions with guests from theatre and cultural policy on the rehearsal stage of the Institute for TFM in an informal context.In the past years with: Beate Heine, Amelie Deuflhard, Martine Dennewald, Marcus Droß, Tim Etchells, Sigrid Gareis, Heiner Goebbels, Kirsten Haß, Carl Hegemann, Katja Herlemann, Stefan Hilterhaus, Marta Keil, Susanne Kennedy, Burkhard Kosminski, Elisa Liepsch and Julian Warner, Matthias Lilienthal, Jan Linders, Stefanie Lorey, Florian Malzacher, Bettina Masuch, Barbara Mundel, the production office „Ehrliche Arbeit“, Milo Rau, She She Pop, Carena Schlewitt and André Schallenberg, Jan Philipp Stange, Julia Stoschek, Tom Stromberg, Hasko Weber and many more. On irregular Wednesdays at 19 o’clock (c.t.). Le Studio. Rehearsal stage of the Theatre Studies department (Probebühne der Theaterwissenschaft), Jügelhaus, building section D, room 108, 1. Floor, Campus Bockenheim.
Scenic performance projects
The Frankfurt Theatre Studies programme puts great emphasis on integrating experience with artistic practice into the programme, no matter whether students aim for a career on stage or behind the scenes later in life. Students regularly work with professional artists within the framework of scenic performance projects, theory-practice-project workshops and weekend-seminars on the rehearsal stage of the Institute. In past years with: Robin Arthur, Sebastian Blasius, Laurent Chétouane, Prof. Dr. Katrin Deufert und Thomas Plischke, Tim Etschells, Manuela Infante, Jason Jacobs, Rupert Jaud, John Jesurun, Katharina Kellermann, Chris Kondek, Prof. Stefanie Lorey, Lina Majdalanie, Uwe Mengel, Gerardo Naumann, Boris Nikitin, Prof. Mike Pearson, Katharina Pelosi, redpark, Felix Rothenhäusler, Diego Rotman, Tucké Royale, Johannes Schmit, Jan-Philipp Stange, Katharina Stephan, Tore Vagn Lid, Camila Vetters, Rosa Wernecke, Ivna Zić.
Research-Colloquium and Masterclass
The Theatre Studies Department highly values the connection of teaching and research. We are committed to teaching our research. That is why each semester, we offer a Research-Colloquium for Master-students, where we discuss current questions in research as well as the final projects of students. Furthermore, we regularly hold Master Classes. They give students the opportunity to present and discuss their own academic work within the framework of a public event with international academic and theatre practitioner guests. Past events have concerned themselves with these topics: „Critical Theatre Research“ (Winter 23/24), “[Bühnen]Besetzungen” (Winter 20/21), “Sound Knowledge: Exploring the Dramaturgies, Philosophies, and Politics of Listening” (Winter 19/20), „Implosion of the municipal theatre? History, Analysis, Perspective“ (Winter 18/19), „Theatre and Identity Politics“ (Winter 17/18), „Theatre of the A-Human“ (Winter 15/16), Kafka and Theatre“ (Winter 13/14). Presentations, contributions and results are documented here:
https://blog.studiumdigitale.uni-frankfurt.de/theater/
http://www.theater-wissenschaft.de/category/thewis/ausgabe-2017-kafka-und-theater/
Artistic-academic Symposium
‘Plus d’un théâtre”: With a recurring reference to Derrida’s notion about how we are entangled in “plus d’une langue”, the aim of the symposium in february 2025 was to discuss how theatre could be thought of: as more than the theatre of a certain form, but also as one that is actually no longer theatre and thus transcends set definitions.
We, a group of former and current doctoral students and employees in theatre studies and scenography, invited you to think about where theatre, performance and dance enable transitions into realities and at the same time reach beyond these realities. Contributions from Claudia Bosse, Martina Groß, Günther Heeg, Rembert Hüser, Judith Kasper, Liz Kohlhaas, Krassimira Kruschkova, André Schallenberg, Gerald Siegmund and a performance by Boris Nikitin thematised where and how scenic attempts, concepts and ideas negotiate the limits of representability and thus themselves move at these limits, come close to them, touch them and let them fall away again.
The symposium ‘Plus d’un théâtre – Potentialitäten eines eingreifenden Denkens’ took place on 6 and 7 February 2025 at Frankfurt LAB.
Coaching
Dramaturgy and CDPR students will be supported in their artistic projects by choaches who come from the field of dramaturgical practice. That’s why we work with practitioners from municipal and state theatres as well as from the Free Scene. In the past few semesters, students worked with: Björn Auftrag, Laurent Chétouane, Marcus Dross, Martin Hammer, Maria Magdalena Ludewig (T), Katja Leclerc, Kris Merken, Malin Nagel and Jonas Zipf.
Friedrich Hölderlin Guest Lectures in General and Comparative Theatre Studies
Within the framework of this lecture series we will situate Theatre Studies in the context of those philosophical and political questions that are always at play when thinking about theatre, but that are often obscured. Next to questions that strictly concern theatre, the talks of our guests will also deal themselves with questions on theatre theory and theory referring to theatre. These talks deal with theatre in all its four meanings, in accordance with the Leipzig discourse on theatricality: Theatre, anti-theatre, theatre in a wider sense and not-theatre. Our extended understanding of “Theatre“ is situated closely to newer findings in the field of Theatre Studies: We want to establish a notion of Theatre Studies that places it outside of the national-philological explanation of 1930s Germany as well as outside of the limitation of the staged performance, suggested by Max Hermann, the founder of Theatre Studies in the German-speaking context, at the turn of the 19th century. Theatre is more than the ephemeral product of an evening, but is also process, interaction, action and especially critical practice.
By choosing Hölderlin as the namesake for this lecture series, we seek to remember that Hölderlin, who lived in Frankfurt for some time, wasn’t just a great poet, but also a great theatre theoretician and dramaturgical thinker, who opened up the thinking of modern theatre with his Sophocles translations, fragments of writing and comments on “Ödipus” and “Antigone”. This is especially true when considering the ineluctable condition of “mediation”.
Recordings of past lectures:
https://blog.studiumdigitale.uni-frankfurt.de/theater/blog/category/hoelderlin-gastvortraege/
Digital Archive
With the project “Digital Theatre Research” the institute is pioneering in the field of digital documentation, digital mediation and experimentation with theater.
At “Digital Theatre Research” documentations of conferences, lectures, symposia and other events will be uploaded. On the “Digital Stage” you will find video experiments, tutorials and documentations of student projects. In the “Laboratory Video⇄Stage” various workshops with specialists from the interface of video and theatre took and take place.
