Marianna Kozak and Šimon Peták’s aim was to understand and describe various approaches to teaching dramaturgy and teaching acting. They explored the role of the original author’s work in education, as well as the position of students of dramaturgy and acting in relation to other study programmes.
Building on his PhD research, which is focused on different ways of teaching and studying dramaturgy, Šimon Peták compared dramaturgy study programmes at four schools. His contribution began as a traditional power-point presentation but turned out to be performative. Because he was comparing four different programmes at four different schools in three different countries and was worried that the audience could lose track, he decided to keep the audience’s attention with objects: the four schools were represented by four simple puppets. Šimon spent at least three months at each school, doing field research. Afterwards, he was able to describe the relationship between educational institutions and artistic institutions in connection to dramaturgy. Finally, he focused on the role of artistic work in dramaturgy studies.
Marianna Kozak presented the pedagogical work of Nikolaj V. Demidov, who was a Russian teacher and director. She compared Demidov’s opinions on the pedagogical process to the study programme at the Department of “Authorial” (i.e., “devised”) Acting at DAMU in Prague, where she studied. This department is focused on a psychosomatically oriented approach to dramatic culture and creation and cultivates dramatic skills such as movement, voice, devised writing, and the specific discipline of dialogical acting. Marianna asked herself whether “Demidov’s school” could offer a new perspective on teaching devised acting at DAMU. She suggests that Nikolaj V. Demidov and Ivan Vyskočil, one of the leading figures at DAMU, have both used innovative methods of teaching acting at drama schools, cultivated an independent actor, and shaped their pedagogical work as a combination of research and teaching. She realised that their approaches could even cooperate and correspond.