For all of them, it began with everything standing still: the present year’s crop of graduating stage directors at the Max Reinhardt Seminar—Manuel Horak, Lukas Schöppl, and Florian Thiel—commenced their studies at the height of the pandemic. That period’s outward stasis had given rise to an inner urge to move forward—and all three, with their starkly differing life histories up to then, took and passed the entrance examination for the Max Reinhardt Seminar’s stage directing programme.

Elizabeth Blonzen has been teaching the subject of Role Development at the Max Reinhardt Seminar since October 2024. In the following, the actor and playwright tells mdw Magazine why Vienna is the ideal city for actors, how one goes about cultivating courageous acting personalities, and why people at the Max Reinhardt Seminar might allow each other a little something more.

Actor Katharina Haudum also works as an intimacy coordinator— in which capacity she has been teaching the course Intimacy Coordination and Consent-Based Practice at the Max Reinhardt Seminar since the summer semester of 2024. She recently provided mdw Magazine with intriguing insights into her work.

In her recently published book Die Zeitreisende [Time Traveler], global star Ute Lemper describes her unusual journey as an artist—including the years she spent at the Max Reinhardt Seminar. The reading tour of this multiple award-winning actor, singer, dancer, and author included a stop in Vienna, where she joined us at the Seminar for this interview.

Alexandra Althoff, dramaturge and former artistic director of the Burgtheater, assumed leadership of the mdw’s Max Reinhardt Seminar on 1 March 2024. She and Steffen Jäger, who serves as her deputy head, speak about these new responsibilities, the challenges and planned emphases during their term in office.

Director Christina Tscharyiski, born in Vienna in 1988, has been looking forward quite a bit to her involvement with the Max Reinhardt Seminar as a visiting director this summer semester. She’s now hard at work with the third-year acting class on a staged production of Elfriede Jelinek’s text Sonne, los jetzt!

For the current academic year of 2023/24, director Sarantos-Georgios Zervoulakos is teaching as a visiting professor of drama directing at the Max Reinhardt Seminar—which is not the first time he’s returned to the institution where he originally studied. Then as now, what he values most of all about the Seminar is Max Reinhardt’s concept of an ensemble that allows actors and directors to “grow up” in an atmosphere of close interaction and mutual inspiration.

Just what is it that underpins the actor’s craft? Anja Thiemann, a professor at the Max Reinhardt Seminar since March 2023, provides mdw Magazine with some insights into her work with first-year acting students, her multifaceted career, and her efforts to put suppressed women authors back in the spotlight.

After serving as the Burgtheater’s deputy artistic director, Alexandra Althoff found it important to get back in direct contact with young people working toward theatrical careers and return to the Max Reinhardt Seminar, where she’d already taught from 2013 to 2018.

The plot of Olivia Scheucher’s diploma production at the Max Reinhardt Seminar plays out amidst the world of the Austrian Armed Forces—which isn’t an alien environment for this graduate of the drama directing programme.