CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, March 29, 2017

An Interview with Alexander Schroeder OnTheatre and the Refugee Crisis in Berlin

The Theatre Times: Alexander Schroeder has been working for the last fifteen years in the acting department at the University of the Arts in Berlin. During that time, he has also been teaching at universities in Salzburg, Leipzig, Dresden, Hannover, Weimar, Stuttgart, Cairo, and other places. He also has been acting and directing in the Berlin theatre scene for the past thirty years. He was an assistant director and member of the Schaubühnen-Ensemble and has worked with Peter Stein, Peter Zadek, Andrea Breth, Luc Bondy, Klaus Michael Grüber, Thomas Ostermeier, and others. In 2015 the productions he participated in as a writer and actor won various awards: Jobs in Heaven (produced by posttheater) won the Stuttgarter Theaterpreis award; and Das Projekt bin ich (The project is me) won the German radio award, the Hörspielpreis der ARD.

1 comment:

Alexa James-Cardenas said...

I really loved this article. In 11th grade, I was co-president of the Human Rights Club at my school, and that year we focused on the Global Refugee crisis. What I really remember throughout the whole time is that I just wanted to know more about the people who are fleeing and in the camps. And so, there were only a couple of documentaries and I got to briefly meet someone who was temporarily in one of those camps, and found myself thinking, I want to know the people. So, having theatre being brought to the camps, them acting out their story, hopefully, it will come back to us and we can see their story, because that is theatre. Yes, we add intricacies and fanciful designs/movement to it but at the core of theatre is people and their emotions and situations playing out for others to watch and experience themselves. Theatre, especially of a story of true lives, is an intimacy between human beings and sharing of empathy and soul. If we can sympathize with fictional characters, who are basically a mesh of human emotions, then seeing plays and performance pieces of the refugee will further spread not only knowledge but empathy to everyone who sees them and will hopefully spread.