Summer Academy 2026

Masterclasses, Workshops & Lectures

The Masterclasses (1 day each, Thu or Fri)

Masterclass 1 (D)
“Navigating while Drifting”* in System-oriented Dramatherapy: Exploring the Connections between the Collective and Personal Unconscious (and what this has to do with climate change and perhaps even the gods…)
Ingrid Lutz

If we imagine the collective unconscious as an ocean and the personal unconscious as a wave arising within it, it becomes clear how limited therapeutic action focused on the individual is. The aim of this workshop is to stimulate a fundamental change in our perspective on therapy and to provide concrete tools for navigating this ‘sea’.
We see climate change not only as an ecological crisis, but also as a symptom of a profound alienation: from ourselves, our bodies and our embeddedness in larger contexts. The same alienation could perhaps also be the root of many psychological symptoms. The key here is to establish a new connection between the collective and personal unconscious.
It is important to understand the family unconscious as a crucial link through which collective narratives shape or ‘construct’ our personal identity, as well as embedding it in transpersonal contexts (transpersonal = beyond the personal). Only by reactivating these transpersonal connections, the ‘gods’, and reconnecting our individual histories to the universal human experience collected in myths can we give our personal lives and our therapeutic work a deeper meaning.
In practical terms, we will use our collective dramatherapy repertoire in the workshop: with the help of systemic staging, we will explore these connections and work with indigenous myths. These myths tell us in many different ways about the necessity of crossing boundaries, breaking family and collective rules, and creating something new out of chaos!
(*German book title by Fritz B. Simon and Gunthard Weber, 2017)

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Masterclass 2 (E)
Dramatic Resonances
Bringing the Forces of Life into Synchronous Play in Group Work
Dr. Susana Pendzik

The word “resonance” (deriving from the Latin resonantia) denotes an “echo” – a sound that is perceived once more (re-sonates). Resonance has been generally associated with synchronous phenomena; and in the field of psychotherapy, it aligns with concepts such as “embodied empathy,” “affect attunement,” and “emotional synchrony.”
Dramatic reality can be conceptualised as a potential resonator: When the contents that people bring into a therapeutic session reach this realm in an organic way, a subtle process of oscillation, destabilization, reorganization, and transformation of old patterns is set into motion: This is what it feels like when concrete manifestations of human imagination in the present moment resonate within the psyche.
Dramatic Resonances is a dramatherapy approach grounded in the transformative power of dramatic reality and its ability to produce resonances in the human psyche. The approach is founded on the creative-intuitive responses of group members or/and the therapist to an “input” presented to them. The input may be a personal experience, issue, memory or dream, brought up by a participant or client, or a non-personal source (such as a myth, story, or literary text) introduced as a therapeutic intervention. The approach combines elements from various fields, including the shamanic paradigm, playback theatre, mindfulness, deconstruction theory and intersubjectivity.
This workshop demonstrates the use of Dramatic Resonances in group work. Participants will experience the approach, explore personal and non-personal narratives, and learn about the possible applications of the technique as an intervention in therapy, supervision, and training.

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Masterclass 3 (E)
Embodied Aesthetics in Dramatherapy
Salvo Pitruzzella

This masterclass aims to experiment with embodied aesthetics, inviting participants to consider dramatherapy not only as a therapeutic modality but as a rich aesthetic experience in itself. The session will commence with a critical examination of the concept of aesthetics, moving beyond the conventional association with the appreciation or judgement of beauty, and reframing it as a vital form of embodied knowledge, integral to human nature. In the experiential part, we will explore in depth some basic improvisation formats, in which an imaginative frame allows people to experiment with their bodies in new and sometimes unusual ways, and we will develop them by playing with their ‘forms of vitality’: Grounding and Movement awareness, referring to our fundamental relationship with our bodies and the spaces we inhabit; Speed, Rhythm, and Pace, describing the temporal qualities of movement; Space exploration, Individual and Shared spaces, addressing how we interact with the environment; Lightness/Heaviness, concerning the quality of movement as it relates to weight and effort; Opposition/Strain, Body release, and Balance, reflecting the internal dynamics of movement; Direction, Encounter, and Exchange, focussing on orientation and interaction. Sharing the individual resonances of the experience, we will create second-level metaphors that open new dimensions of meaning, which will be in turn explored with the body. Finally, the journey will be celebrated in songs.

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Masterclass 4 (D)
Your own stage in the system
Dramatherapeutic attitude, identity, and effectiveness in clinical settings
Bettina Stoltenhoff-Erdmann

Dramatherapists in clinical settings work in complex, multi-professional systems. Different therapeutic schools, institutional frameworks, hierarchies, and implicit role expectations shape their everyday work and repeatedly put dramatherapy approaches and methods to the test.
This can create an area of tension: between adaptation and independence, the wish to fit into existing structures and the need to represent one’s own dramatherapeutic identity visibly, effectively, and confidently.
This workshop addresses precisely this issue and focuses on attitude, self-consciousness, and creative drive within the system. Through scenic explorations, we make power relations, role models, and inner adjustment movements visible and negotiable. Using dramatherapeutic, like scenic and projective methods, we explore how a clear dramatherapeutic identity can be developed, embodied, and maintained in everyday clinical practice. This creates space to clarify our own boundaries and redefine scope for action. It also allows us to view possibilities and connections within the system from a different perspective. Our dramatherapeutic expertise also opens up specific opportunities to support connecting processes within the team.
A particular focus is placed on the resource-oriented approach in dramatherapy, which is characterized by an awareness of the healing powers of our medium. In a clinical context that is often deficit- and symptom-oriented, this approach represents a conscious professional positioning: it focuses on the abilities, creativity, self-efficacy, and scope for action of the patients – and thus also on the therapist’s own therapeutic effectiveness.
The central question is how dramatherapists can make their work meaningful and effective not only despite, but also within the context of clinical structures. How can we represent our dramatherapeutic approaches and methods with inner confidence and create suitable conditions for our work? This will enable us to accompany patients in their developmental steps with energy and joy in the long term.

The Workshops (2 days, Thu and Fri)

Workshop 1 (D)
The Power of Storytelling
Connections between Dramaherapy Practice and Playback Theater
Henk Göbel

Playback theater, which goes back to Jo Salas and Jonathan Fox, is a form of improvisational or interactive theater that draws on the tradition of storytelling: audience members recount personal experiences or tell stories from their lives, which are then acted out and replayed by the performers/musicians.
It thrives on the interplay between the personal stories of individual audience members, the embodied echoes of the performers, and the resonances in the audience. This form of improvisational theater opens up a space in which people can talk about themselves – about difficult and easy things, about moving and comforting things. The sensitive listening of the stories by the actors/musicians creates one (or more) echoes in them. Proven forms of play form the vessel in which the echoes are staged and “played back.”
Consciously perceiving the echoes and embodying them enables different perspectives and/or a deeper understanding of the stories, both for the narrators, the audience, and the performers.
In this workshop, we will explore different levels of echoes in stories in playback theater, devote ourselves to storytelling and listening with (as many) senses as possible, and try out some basic, simple forms of playback theater.
We will also look at existing and possible connections between playback theater and dramatherapy practice.

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Workshop 2 (E)
Playfulness in Tense Spaces: Creating Life Forces in Drama Therapy
Dr. Amani Mussa

This workshop explores playfulness as a vital life force in dramatherapy—an attitude and a therapeutic craft that brings movement, imagination, and spontaneity into spaces that may feel tense, stuck, or muted. Through experiential work with Playback Theatre, participants will discover how improvised listening, embodied response, and story-based play create a universal and accessible framework for therapeutic exploration.
Drawing on Robert Landy’s role theory, the workshop will highlight the expansion of role repertoire as a pathway to emotional flexibility and renewed vitality. Playfulness will be presented not only as a tool but as an inner orientation that enables shifts between roles, allows symbolic distance, and opens space for curiosity and creative possibility.
While the focus remains on play and vitality, the workshop will hold gentle awareness of cultural sensitivity and the subtle tensions that arise in encounters with difference, recognizing that playfulness naturally softens barriers and supports connection.

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Workshop 3 (E)
Crafting Small Plays about Important Things
Dr. Anna Seymour

This workshop will be devoted to the creation of short plays for performance which are aimed at expressing things that matter to us.
It will provide an opportunity to use theatre to articulate what can be difficult to say in other contexts.
An essential part of the workshop will be returning to the fundamentals of crafting theatre which require attention to the specifics of presence, setting, use of space and connection with an audience. This is based in the belief that by paying attention to aesthetic details we can deepen the therapeutic potential of making theatre.
Anna Seymour who is offering the workshop will bring extensive professional experience from a number of different contexts, from performing, devising and directing work, to training and facilitating community actors and dramatherapists.
In addition, she brings the experience of being an adoptive parent to two children who had endured significant neglect and domestic violence. Nightly performances of ‘plays in the living room’ became an almost daily ritual where important stories were shared.

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Workshop 4 (D)
The Therapist’s Inner Stage
Co-regulation, Play Partnership, and the Tension between Openness and Imposition
Aylien Yanik

What happens in the moment of therapeutic encounter – when eyes meet, bodies resonate, and silence takes on meaning?
This workshop invites to enter the therapist’s inner stage: that pulsating space of experience where therapeutic processes arise, stall, or unfold.
From a polyvagal theory perspective, we explore how our inner state – the quality of our presence, our nervous system, and our often unconscious signals – contributes into whether the other person can open up. Whether play becomes possible. Whether risk can be taken.
In scenic and body-based exercises, we consciously leave behind the position and role of controlling experts and enter the terrain of genuine play partnership and co-regulation. How does the process change when my inner insecurity suddenly becomes apparent in the room? When compassion tips over? When a well-intentioned impulse causes the other person to freeze?
We explore those electrifying moments between protection and imposition – the narrow threshold where therapeutic development happens. When does openness invite liveliness? And when does it turn into a subtle form of overload?

The focus is on questions such as:

• How do I embody security while challenging at the same time?
• How do I hold tension without discharging it prematurely?
• How do I remain a play partner and still take responsibility?

This workshop is aimed at practitioners who want to explore their own presence as an essential therapeutic tool – with curiosity, a willingness to reflect, and a readiness to understand uncertainty and stumbling as part of professional skill.

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Saturday

• Impressions from the workshops and masterclasses
• Lectures by our international guests
• Panel discussion

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Some workshops are held in English, some in German, they are marked accordingly (E) / (D).