Hardly anything better can happen to acting students than to be prepared for the professional reality of the theater by someone like Burgtheater actress Julia Windischbauer. This opportunity, among other things, was created by Anke Held, head of the Linz Bruckner University institute, together with her colleagues Peter Wittenberg and Margareta Pesendorfer, during the three-day acting laboratory that ended yesterday.
On Saturday, students from the Graz University of Art and the Vienna Reinhardt Seminar had already shown a movement improvisation with “My boy likes to rest” and, on the other hand, discussed what tenderness between men means with the performance “Call Me (,) Daddy”. Yesterday, Windischbauer described in her gripping and humorous way what peaks and trapdoors the acting profession has in store.
Windischbauer and Held have known each other for more than ten years: Back then, the now 27-year-old took her first steps on stage at the Spielclub of the Linz State Theater. Her grandfather introduced her to this art with the Linz-Dornach amateur stage. At first, Windischbauer wanted to become a musical actress until she discovered the power of texts and language. While studying at the Otto Falckenberg School in Munich, she won the renowned O. E. Hasse Prize and was hired by the Munich Kammerspiele. From there she went to the Deutsches Theater Berlin, and since September she has been a member of the Burgtheater ensemble, where her leading roles in “Hildensaga” and “Iphigenie auf Tauris” were hymnically praised.
She still commutes between Vienna and Berlin because five of her productions are still on the Deutsches Theater schedule. She draws her self-confidence from the certainty “that I want to tell a story,” says Windischbauer, which will be seen as Faith in the upcoming “Everyman” at the Salzburg Festival.
How important accent-free language is in theater, how Windischbauer defines physical and psychological boundaries and whether it makes sense to get an agency while studying – the students now know these questions, among others.
Author
Peter Grubmüller
Head of Culture Department
Peter Grubmüller
