Since 2016, students from the Institute of Theatre Education at the Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences, Lingen campus, have regularly visited WESTWIND as part of the module “History, Theory and Practice of Theatre for Children and Teens”. A key component of the seminar involves viewing the selected national and international productions and engaging in a descriptive, evaluative discussion so as to use their week-long excursion to gain insight into contemporary formats of theatre for young audiences.
During the festival, the students keep a journal in which they record their daily impressions and reflect on the aesthetics of what they’ve seen in a production or their sensory experience at an event. At the end of the seminar, each student writes a paper that analyses an aesthetic, conceptual or dramaturgical feature in greater depth.
In retrospect, in the past few years many students have stated that WESTWIND festival served as an impulse for their own artistic work and led to a clear decision to explicitly dedicate themselves to theatre for young audiences. In addition to the “Next Generation Forum”, this seminar can thus be considered a further building block in the promotion of young talent in the scene.
The seminar is led by David Gruschka, who has been a lecturer at the Institute of Theatre Education since 2011.