Workshop: Marie Schleef

Workshop Info.

Date｜2025/11/17 (Mon.) - 11/21 (Fri.) 
Language of Instruction｜English

Workshop Description

Slow Down

In this workshop, we explore the concept of time. As we shift tempos, we collectively delve into the realm of slow-motion movement. How can we make 10 minutes on stage feel like an hour? How can we stretch the sense of time and challenge the audience's perception, while sustaining our focus and tension as performers? The goal of this workshop is to achieve a collective shift in movement and rhythm while maintaining the mental endurance required to sustain this state throughout an entire performance.

About the Artist

Marie Schleef is a theater director whose work centers on the unknown, forgotten, and unseen. She is particularly interested in staging the work of female authors that has never been performed in the German-speaking theater world. Her multimedia approach plays with minimal language use and time and space manipulation, often through slow motion.

After growing up in a trilingual family in Germany and Austria and attending high school in Eswatini, she studied theater and performance at Bard College in New York and directing at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin. She subsequently worked as an assistant director at Volksbühne Berlin for artists such as Susanne Kennedy and Yael Bartana.

She works in both the repertory theater systems of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and the off-scene. Her work has been performed at the Volksbühne Berlin, the Ballhaus Ost, the Kosmos Theater Vienna, the Schauspiel Köln, the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, the Münchner Kammerspiele, the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden, and the Burgtheater. It has also been invited to numerous festivals, ranging from Theatertreffen and Radikal Jung to Autor:innentheatertage at Deutsches Theater Berlin. She is also the recipient of the CHANEL Next Prize, awarded to ten innovative artists worldwide, as well as the Kurt-Hübner-Regiepreis for young directors.

In the 2025/2026 season, she will premiere two new pieces: "ARE YOU READY TO DIE?", a devised performance about female incarceration and the death penalty, at Schauspiel Zürich; and Shirley Jackson's iconic 1948 short story "The Lottery" at Schauspiel Essen.

She is based in Berlin. 

For more information: www.marieschleef.de