The Acting Programme is committed to this ambition to reflect social processes and influence them through the means of art. 

Part of the four-year programme’s concept is to organize instruction as scene studies—with many different teachers—in small groups of students. The rehearsals lasting five to six weeks lead to a performance in front of faculty and students. 

In addition to full-time faculty, students work with professional actors as well as directors, which aids the orientation towards the profession of actor from the very beginning. The programme’s first two years are characterized by continuous work on scene studies and systematics, while the third and fourth years are structured by project-based work. 
The aim of this joint learning is the depiction of a figure, a story, the path from the “I” to the “you of the role.” This mainly humanist orientation of the department is based, amongst other things, on the traditions of Konstantin Stanislavski and Bertolt Brecht. 

Beginning in the second semester, students apply what they have learned in scene studies in small groups of between two and four participants, and are confronted with increasingly complex demands, both in terms of form and content. Over the entire course of the programme, the teaching is based on concepts derived from the multifaced forms of German-speaking and world theater, where, for example, psychological realism, epic theater, elements of commedia dell’arte, form-conscious ways of acting, and contemporary texts endure. The choice of scene studies is made jointly by the department’s faculty, and is designed to do justice to the artistic development of every individual student.  Furthermore, there will be teaching units where the concrete choice lies in the hands of students (free project, role chosen by students).

From the third year onwards, the programme offers students the possibility to work with students from the departments of Contemporary Puppetry and Directing, and to participate in cooperation projects with Berlin theaters. Beyond that, there are further foci in the programme. These include gestural speech, specialized body work, musical education, theater history, and a dramaturgical engagement with texts and theater forms, diction, and clowning. 

All programme courses are defined by the shared goal to train students for contemporary forms of acting in all their diversity, and to be open for the different aesthetics that come with the profession—while always maintaining the highest levels of skill and craft.