When actors, directors, and producers meet, casting calls are frequently the reason. As was the case this time—with one difference: to ring in the new year, Avia Seeliger met with Ercan Karaçayli, Daniel Holzberg, and Lena Weiss to discuss the phenomenon of typecasting.

For several years, now, the Standing Conference on Actors’ Training (Ständige Konferenz Schauspielausbildung – SKS) has been organising central auditions for the German-speaking region’s acting schools. At these events, students from the current year’s graduating classes present themselves to specialist audiences with an eye to landing engagements at the region’s various theatres. In the following, students from the graduating class of 2022 provide us with some impressions of their whirlwind trip to Neuss, Berlin, and Munich for the graduate auditions known as the Absolvent_innen-Vorspiele.

When we get goosebumps at a concert, when our eyes tear up at the words we hear spoken onstage, or when we hold our breaths out of excitement during some other type of performance, what we’re experiencing are one-of-a-kind moments that can’t be reproduced in all their aspects—or, for that matter, repeated in exactly the same way.

Olga Shparaga, philosopher, activist, and author (The Face of the Revolution is Female: The Case of Belarus) speaking at the mdw on the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 Dec. 2021.

The MMRC lecture is an annual event of the Music and Minorities Research Center (MMRC). Due to the hybrid format in which this year’s event was held, the audience was able to participate both in the mdw’s Joseph Haydn-Saal and online via Zoom.

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course…” Homer’s epic poem that recounts the wide-ranging journeys of Odysseus begins with an invocation of the muse (here in the English translation by Robert Fagle). She is asked to tell us of these heroic deeds. We will listen, promises the voice in the prologue, and the Odyssey begins…

We live in an age of information. Never before has so much information been produced, and never before has obtaining quick access to it been so easy. Information is everywhere—and it’s often said that we’re dealing with a flood of it. At the same time, untold quantities of information are lost on a daily basis, with much content being ephemeral and/or generated only for the sake of a brief moment. Thereafter, it disappears into the infinite depths of the Internet.