I am Roberto Romeo. I’ve been studying acting at the mdw since October 2021.

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.

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.

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.

Stage director and Max Reinhardt seminar professor Anna Maria Krassnigg has loads of experience directing Shakespeare’s plays. But even for this experienced director, putting on Macbeth at the Hanoi Academy of Theatre and Cinema is an adventure.

There are those people to whom, when they speak, we could listen forever—almost no matter what they say; it somehow touches us and sweeps us along. And then there are others whom we can’t follow; sitting in the theatre, we grow restless or can’t quite manage to absorb what they’re declaiming. Why is this so?

In the series “What do the arts have to do with the Earth’s climate?”, the “Green mdw” initiative is inviting concerned individuals to speak out on their personal approaches to this issue. Maria Happel, born in Spessart, Germany in 1962, joined the ensemble of the Burgtheater in Vienna following engagements in Cologne, Hannover, and Bremen between 1991 and 1999.