Theater Macht Archive

In a second lecture, Prof. Dr. Anna Blekastad Watson will speak in English about Rudolf Penka's theater pedagogy activities in Scandinavia. This will offer an opportunity to revisit the work of the former director of the State Drama School Berlin—the predecessor institution of the HfS—which is now largely absent from the canon of theater history.

The lecture series is aimed particularly at archival, museum, and artistic research practitioners, as well as emerging theater scholars and researchers, and provides a platform for networking. Whether in production archives, state archives, and records relating to theater buildings, in private collections, or on digital platforms, the series will confront theater and its archival sites with questions concerning (un)conscious collecting strategies and policies of preservation. The patterns of “archival power” (Michel-Rolph Trouillot) are embedded in physical and institutional structures.

Theater makers utilize a wide variety of archives to incorporate historical experience into theatrical events, generating and documenting new knowledge. In doing so, they frequently address and (critically) reflect upon the patterns of “archival power,” as these patterns influence the dramaturgy and aesthetics of archive-based theater. This lecture series is part of the BMFTR-funded archive and research project “Dramaturgies of an Archive” (DramA) at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts Berlin and Humboldt University of Berlin.

The first lecture will be held online, and the second is expected to be a hybrid event. The lectures, along with further details, will soon be listed as events in the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts calendar.

• Please register for each lecture in advance by emailing einladung@hfs-berlin.de so that we can send you the link to the online meeting room.
  

Dates

Tue, Jan 20, 2026
Prof. Dr. Jan Lazardzig: "Theatre Building Knowledge - Objects, Media, and Discourses between the German Empire and the Cold War" 6:15 p.m. / approx. 1:15 h Online (Zoom)


Tue, Feb 3, 2026

• Prof. Dr. Anna Blekastad Watson: "From Berlin to Scandinavia and Back: In the Footsteps of Rudolf Penka" 6:15 p.m. / approx. 1:15 h Hybrid (Zoom)
  
• Anna Blekastad Watson: "From Berlin to Scandinavia and Back: In the Footsteps of Rudolf Penka"
  

Although his name is hardly present in the German-speaking theater world today, Rudolf Penka shaped the training at the State Drama School Berlin and the later Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts from 1960 to 1985 as director and later professor of acting. In 1967, with an ITI symposium in Stockholm, where a delegation led by Penka presented the results of their training practice for the first time, Penka's nearly twenty-year teaching career in Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark began. The Penka method—a combination of Stanislavski's psychophysical method with Brecht's dialectical theater thinking—is still discussed in Scandinavia today.

This lecture takes his international influence as an opportunity to re-examine, from an external perspective, a theater pedagogue who was influential at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts but is not yet considered a canonical figure.

All those interested from academia, theater practice, archives, and research, but especially Penka's alumni and contemporaries, are invited to the lecture and subsequent discussion to rediscover and discuss his significance. The lecture will be held in English.

Anna Blekastad Watson is an adjunct professor of theater studies at the University of Agder. She received her PhD in 2021 from the University of Bergen with a dissertation on political group theaters in Norway. Previously, she taught Theatre Studies at the University of Bergen (2012–22) as well as practical theatre subjects and theatre pedagogy at the universities in Volda and Vestlandet. She regularly publishes theatre reviews and scholarly articles in relevant journals.


FYI

As early as the winter semester of 2024/25, numerous connections between theatre and archives were explored through presentations by Johanna Stapelfeldt & Dr. Anna Luise Kiss, Prof. Dr. Erdmut Wizisla, Dr. Carolina Heberling & Lotta Beckers, and Dipl.-Ing. Franziska Ritter as part of the lecture series “Theatre Power Archives.”

In the summer semester of 2025, presentations by Rea Kurmann from the Rom*nja Theatre Collective and Dr. Elaheh Hatami, initiator of the Iranian Dance Archive in Exile, investigated the various levels of reference between a theatre history that is archived and that is theatrically referenced.