This year’s master’s theses from the Stage Design_Scenic Space programme at TU Berlin impressively demonstrate the diversity and innovative strength of the graduates. The projects presented range from stage and costume design concepts for texts by playwright Alice Birch and the play ‘Weltwärts’ by Noah Haidle to installative, immersive and multimedia works on freely chosen themes. The spectrum of works ranges between artistic practice, political statement and spatial research. The Master’s theses are exemplary of the attitude and commitment of the students, who open up new perspectives on scenic space with their designs and installations and take responsibility for social issuesThe Master’s examinations as part of the exhibition ‘ZEIGT SZENE’ took place from 30 June to 2 July 2025 in the former canteen of Teufelsberg Berlin. The exhibition was designed by the 18 students under the mentorship of lecturer Franziska Ritter.

‘The Clinic of the Unbodied’ by Maria Basantes is a performative media installation about transformation, materiality and posthuman intimacy. In a clinical setting, the boundaries between human and non-human are dissolved by water-soluble costumes. The water becomes the protagonist, the costume the actor.
Lecturers: Manja Beneke, Prof. Kerstin Laube

Based on the mining town of Kiruna in the north of Sweden, above the Arctic Circle, Johanna Schulze’s work ‘i Gruvan – Choreography of a Conflict Landscape’ examines the interlocking of landscape, labour, housing, social ideals, control and power. Archive material, memoirs, spatial analyses and a personal journey meet scenographic strategies of translation. At the centre is the question of how industrial control shapes not only landscape but also identities and what remains when the surface loses stability.
Lecturers: Steffi Wurster, Johann Jörg

The walk-in room and video installation ‘body of females’ by Jessica Kaczmarek examines the relationship between language, body and socially defined gender roles. The starting point is the theatre play Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again by Alice Birch, which visualises patriarchal structures in fragmentary form – particularly with regard to work, sexuality, motherhood and language use. The central element of the work is a walk-in interior whose materiality and form evoke associations with the inside of a human body. Flesh-coloured walls and symbolically exaggerated objects such as an oversized tongue or scissors take up central motifs of the piece spatially. There are puppets in the room, some with fragmentary, historical-looking costumes. Their faces serve as projection surfaces for the faces of actresses who speak scenes from Alice Birch’s play. The figures seem like inhabitants of a timeless parallel universe in which women from different eras meet in a symbolic coffee party.
Questions on the outer walls add a reflective level to the installation. body of females sees itself as a poetic-political space of experience – an invitation to engage physically, emotionally and intellectually with feminist history and the present.
Lecturers: Klemens Kühn, Annette Müller

Florencia Martina’s installation “AGUAFIESTAS” is an invitation to stay. To stay in a home (a world) that is collapsing. A home (a world) in crisis. A home (a world) which destructive violence is not going to be erased by an apocalyptic burn-it-all -never coming and always present- promise of ending. Focused on the act of staying, the project responds to a need of time and space to approach endings, crises and potencies of future making (as situated, multiple and multifaceted).
The installation aims to function as a soothing container and a question offerer in which to sink into while broken stories of Lucifer’s lost future, Morfeo’s forgotten dreams and Sisyphus’s linearity collapse are voiced.
Lecturers: Prof. Kerstin Laube, Prof. Diego Agullo

In her costume and material study ‘Embodying the Witch’, Emma Planckaert works around the figure of the witch – a multi-layered symbol characterised by fear, desire and control. Once used to marginalise women who challenged social norms, her image is shaped by stereotypical notions of appearance, behaviour and sexuality – echoes that still resonate in media and culture today. Instead of rejecting these images, Emma decides to consciously embody them physically – through costume and performance. In this way, Emma explores how meanings shift, fuelled by personal experience and collective cultural memory. The witch is not a fixed figure here, but a changing body – a symbol of resistance, misunderstanding and the reclaiming of power.
Lecturers: Prof. Kerstin Laube, Annette Müller

The interactive media installation ‘SCHWIMMEN’ by Carmen Hartmann examines how a figure, trapped in repetition, can regain agency. Based on Alice Birch’s ‘Ophelia’s Room’, an audio-visual real-time composition was created, structured along the five phases of drowning. A state machine programmed in TouchDesigner and Python, a state-based system that runs through scenes sequentially and reacts to external stimuli, forms the technical foundation of the interactive loop. The audience’s microphone input is used as an acoustic impulse that triggers changes of direction within the sequence and thus enables participatory self-empowerment. The fragmentary narration picks up on the post-digital internet aesthetic ‘corecore’ and interweaves text fragments with materials of the digital present, such as viral TikTok sounds, memes and film quotes. Ophelia exists between poetic fragment, digital exhaustion and feminist re-appropriation. ‘SCHWIMMEN’ does not let her story end in silence, but renegotiates it in a collective act of rebellion.
Lecturers: Steffi Wurster, Prof. Albert Lang

In the spatial and video installation GEHÖRT (Heard engl.), Deborah Nowraty examines how language and space affect the female body and how it eludes these attributions through performative gesture, material and movement. The performative video installation combines voice, text, textile structures, light and projection to create a choreographed experiential space in which the body is not only described but also becomes politically effective. Initially, the space is controlled: language, light and projections direct the body and attribute meaning to it. But with the intrusion of the female voice, a change begins – the artist withdraws, the structure dissolves. From then on, the performers move autonomously in a web of rope that responds to their bodies, shifts and renegotiates the space.
Lecturers: Klemens Kühn, Isabel Robson

Rina Lipkind’s exhibition ‘Bodenlos’ is based on Flusser’s autobiographical book Bodenlos, which reflects his experiences of flight during the war and cultural assimilation. The installation is presented in the main hall of Hamburg’s railway station and transforms it into a metaphorical station in which a derailed ‘train’ from the past crashes into the present. Inside, the ‘train’ is divided into individual rooms (‘compartments’), each representing a chapter of the book and drawing the portrait of a writer trying to sit down at a table, write and comprehend his life at the moment of collapse. The individual rooms merge into a continuous corridor and become a kind of lens through which the present is viewed in order to find a foothold in an increasingly polarising reality.
Lecturers: Johann Jörg, Steffi Wurster

In her master’s thesis ‘The Skin of Others’, Cecilia Xuetong Feng examines the multi-layered history of Teufelsberg, whose layers of earth harbour traces of violence and the past. Her interactive installation invites the audience to discover the hidden stories of the site by breathing into a microphone and to experience themselves as part of the historical chain. A double-layered wall and a locked bookshelf symbolise the darkness of history and the difficulty of making unspoken violence visible. A central element is a book documenting the numerous dead trees on Teufelsberg – a symbol of the consequences of poor soil conditions. With her work, Cecilia Xuetong Feng poses the question of what role we play in dealing with the past.
Lecturers: Prof. Kerstin Laube, Prof. Albert Lang

In Frida Caldwell’s [Jane Doe], the picture of a person is drawn in fragmentary narratives based on Alice Birch’s “Blank”. With texts by Alice Birch, Miranda July, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace and Sibylle Berg, chapters from a person’s life are dealt with that have a long-term influence on the person’s actions and decisions. It questions how we discuss difficult sociological issues and judge people by their experiences. This individual development is reflected in the set design and costume. The baroque aesthetic, which was fuelled by the suffering of the Thirty Years’ War and the rejection of the previous rationality of the Renaissance, is broken down here to a personal scale. With the growing awareness of one’s own mortality and the state of the world, the need for self-protection and escapism grows.
Lecturers: Klemens Kühn, Prof. Kerstin Laube

The costume and video installation ‘can’t you see I fell?’ by Viana Wagokh is a filmic study of cognitive changes with political and social urgency in the context of identity. Inspired by Alice Birch’s Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. the work visually narrates a changing identity and shows how the inner voice of self-criticism emerges from encounters with external forces such as institutions, relationships, norms and invisible cultural constraints. Through the transformation of materials and objects as well as the physical language of the choreography, subtle emotional burdens that shape the mind and body become tangible. ‘can’t you see I fell?’ reflects the multi-layered interplay between society and the individual, in which external structures leave traces in identity and fragmented identities influence social systems. It is a study without a final solution, offering a visual space to explore the origins of inner conflicts and their reverberations on a broader level.
Lecturers: Klemens Kühn, Eva Born

What does a feminist utopia feel like? Tabea Jorcke’s master’s project “Alice Birch: Revolt. She said. Revolt again. (Revolutionise the world. Begin in the theatre)” transforms the Sophiensæle Berlin into an open, soft and above all safe space: with a sculptural fabric landscape made of woven and knotted carpet pieces and a foyer as if under a tent roof. Inspired by the call for revolution in Alice Birch’s text, a place is created where patriarchy is only visible as the past: a black pedestal with tongues and heads reminds us of what was, and should never be again. The contrast between the violent space of reality and the utopian time-out becomes palpable, and the stage becomes a safe space at the end of the performance. Conceived from the perspective of a woman, but open to all. Here you can sit down, move around, stay. After the play, there is cooking, talking and dancing. An evening that not only shows theatre, but makes it tangible: as a place for closeness, rethinking and a shared future; and as a place that provides access and experience with as few barriers as possible.
Lecturers: Klemens Kühn, Prof. Bettina Auer

The three title-giving words ‘Zeit_Reise_Zeremonie’ in Hanna Krümpfer’s work influenced the design of a space and the development of the stage set from the very beginning. With her stage design (venue: HAU2), Hanna creates a place that both asserts the scenario of the ‘family celebration’ in the garden of the parental home and also depicts the dissolution of (this). The entire space becomes a non-place. The temporality and finiteness of one’s own existence are thematised and made visible both on a spatial level and in the costume. The exploration of the theme of masks was a significant part of this process. In her costume design, Hanna uses a clear setting and references to find a visual language that depicts the figures according to their description without exhibiting them. As part of her Master’s thesis, Hanna developed a stage and costume design, as well as a costume and mask on a 1:1 scale for the play ‘Weltwärts’ by Noah Haidle.
Lecturers: Maria Wolgast, Christina Mrosek

In Pitt Kunath‘s project for the play Weltwärts, a deep blue house rotates on a stage that is constantly in motion. The house gradually disintegrates into six parts: a choreographed process that shows the course of life. A mirrored ceiling opens up a view into a space between life and death. Small details such as a pool ladder or neon signs refer to love, farewell and last words. The stage itself becomes the driving force. Clear, consistent and emotional.
Lecturers: Maria Wolgast, Eva Born

Worlds between life and death: Stella Breuer’s stage design for the play ‘Weltwärts’ by Noah Haidle shows an in-between space – a circular stage in which rituals, memories and reality overlap. A ceremonial landscape of mobile platforms and movable curtains is constantly reorganised and creates changing spaces. The staged ‘show’ takes centre stage, but also reveals quiet and intimate moments. A floating mirror element distorts perspectives, levels and heights. Aesthetically, ‘Weltwärts’ moves between humour, absurdity and kitsch – between the banal and the existential. The actors continually break through the ceremony to tell their stories – with interpersonal relationships taking centre stage. The costumes – like the characters themselves – are exaggerated and artificial, but increasingly lose their glamour as the play progresses. Stage and costume become places of transition.
Lecturers: Maria Wolgast, Klemens Kühn

Stage, but collective: In the practical experiment ‘Come on, let’s make a scene’, Azael Holtz tests how a stage performance based on Noah Haidle’s ‘Weltwärts’ can be conceived, sketched and staged with amateurs interested in theatre and simple means. The focus is on collective, non-hierarchical collaboration and the communication of theatre work to people who are not yet part of the scene. The central architecture of the workshop is a sports hall with all its spatial potential.
Lecturers: Maria Wolgast, Annette Müller

A sketchy stage space unfolds step by step in Rahma Kilouche’s design for ‘Weltwärts’ between memory, transition and dissolution. Transparent materials such as tapestry tulle, thread-like curtains and foils with text create an atmosphere between the visible and the invisible. White furniture with black contours look like traces of a life that is condensed in farewell. Eight actors move through an open space of light, fog and fragments – a space of thought in which death is not experienced as an end, but as a conscious ceremony.
Lecturers: Maria Wolgast, Johann Jörg

In a time characterised equally by chaos and emptiness, by hyperpresence and inner silence, Danijela Matovic creates a space with The Joy of Being in which the boundaries between visibility and invisibility, between linear time and the timeless moment become soft and permeable. Inspired by Noah Haidle’s idea of ‘Weltwärts’, a fragile practice of presence is created – one that does not so much show something as open up: for what is hidden in the transition – between consciousness and silence, between arriving and letting go. Light is at the centre of this performance – as a living source of life, clarity and existence. It is both a reminder and an invitation: to the now, to perception, to the luminous and yet fragile essence of life. Delicate sounds, disembodied whispers and subtle acoustic impulses weave through the space. Not as a staging, but as an invitation to expand one’s own perception – gently, inwards. The Joy of Being is not a classical event. It is a state. A space in which you can simply be who you are. Open. Awake. Still. A quiet celebration of existence. A performance as a transition – soft, permeable, present.
Lecturers: Maria Wolgast, Johann Jörg

This blog post was written with the help of our student intern Paola Reinhardt.
Photos: Peter Teller