Jurij Alschitz
New Perspectives on the Art of Directing
Open Lecture
Dr Jurij Alschitz’s teaching career, spanning over 45 years, has in fact always been a field of research. “I teach what interests me personally,” he would say before every seminar, which meant that with each seminar he broke new ground and gained fresh insights. Like K.S. Stanislavsky in his day, Jurij Alschitz also notes down the many interesting details, innovations and ideas. His textbooks on the art of acting, with their many practical exercises, provide an insight into the ‘School of Jurij Alschitz’, an open, comprehensive methodological system.
Jurij Alschitz has passed on how to work with this system and how to teach it in numerous seminars and courses on directing and teaching.
“Somehow, the material from my seminars and lectures has developed into three books on directing.”
They will be published this autumn
In this open talk, Jurij Alschitz will introduce the subject of his first book: it is about Preparation.
“The first book is devoted to the director’s preparation for a production, but it proposes a completely different way of looking at this process. I suggest that the director should not prepare the future production, but prepare themselves for an encounter with something they do not yet know. Instead of traditionally searching for an idea, a concept, answers, and solutions, the director should learn to preserve the unknown, to listen to the resistance of the text, and to trust the premonition of the performance.
In this book, I ask questions to which the directing profession seems to have known the answers for a long time. But does it really?
- Does a performance necessarily have to be born from a play — or can it emerge even before the play is lying on your desk?
- Does the director’s vision have to exist at the very beginning of the work — or does it gradually reveal itself in the process and become its result?
- Should a director begin the work from a position of knowing — or, on the contrary, from not knowing?
- And what does it really mean to prepare for a performance if the true creative process begins where preparedness ends?”
This introductory lecture is highly recommended for anyone interested in the programme School of Directing, which begins in November 2026
Course dates and Registration
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