Johannes Maria Schmit’s Public defence

Johannes Maria Schmit's artistic PhD project will be made public in DiVA and Research Catalogue on 14 November 2025.

Link to DiVA 
Link to Research Catalogue

Opponent: 
David Barnett

Committee: 
Kristina Hagström-Ståhl 
Egill Heiðar Anton Pálsson 
Chrysa Parkinson
Martin Sonderkamp (substitute)

Main supervisor: 
Jon Refsdal Moe

Supervisor:
Josefine Wikström

Schedule:
13:00 – 13:10 Welcome by Gunilla Pettersson Thafvelin, head of subject area and Cilla Roos, chair of Public Defence.
13:10 – 13:30 Presentation by the respondent.
13:30 – 13:50 Opponent's summary
13:50 – 14:40 Questions and conversation between opponent and respondent. 
14:40 – 15:05 Pause 25 min, fika/refreshments served
15:05 – Questions from the committee
- Questions from the audience
- Break for the audience as the examining committee deliberates
- The committee announces the results
Bubbles – mezzanine

Abstact

    This thesis investigates the crisis of Regie (i.e. of the agency of directing) in a post-#MeToo landscape. It argues that the outset of this crisis lies in an expansionist gesture – rooted in the avant-gardist ambition to merge art and life – by which directors have conflated artistic mandate with managerial control; a gesture culminating in the toxic institutional cultures painfully exposed during the last decade. Starting from this point of no return, the thesis examines the question of how to acknowledge the fact of directorial power abuse without cutting our practices off from the potential – or even the necessity – of directorial agency as such. Its title “Reinventing Regietheater” thus carries the tension between a historical form of theater (generally known as “directors’ theater”) and a yet to be found future expression. 
    Conceived as artistic research, the discrete focus of the thesis is the rehearsal space and its confines. Within the micro-scale of the latter, the crisis of Regie reverberates foremost in the non-foreseeable instances of the actor-director interaction; namely in the increasing scrutiny applied to the tool of improvisation. In contrast to the prevailing strategy of eroding the rehearsal space’s symbolic boundaries (in the interest of directorial accountability), the thesis conceptualizes – practically as well as theoretically – a “Space of Rehearsals” as a heteronomous zone of safe but ecstatic play. This “Space of Rehearsals” is constructed through a rehearsal method informed by the psychoanalytic concept of transference as well as the interaction framework “Wheel of Consent”. 
    To answer its main questions, the thesis presents a “written part” as well as a set of “online resources” containing the documentation and “re-stagings” of the practical experiments. Four “books of Regie” present methodological reflections, a critical genealogy of a theater of directing (based on the author’s symptomatic practice) as well as the central concepts. Three so-called “Pre-studies”, devised through practical work with professional actors/collaborators form the empirical basis of the thesis, sketching out different possibilities for the actor-director relation in a re-invented Regietheater. 
    In the proposition resulting from the above, directorial agency does not necessarily sit with the director. Nevertheless, the disciplinary divide between actor and director is upheld; as well as the radical asymmetry in the distribution of authorial power, albeit in temporally limited and co-curated iterations. The main argument of the thesis is thus that the artistic potential of the historical form of Regietheater can be salvaged without taking a revanchist or revisionist stance: the idiosyncratic directorial agency known as Regie has its place in consent-based rehearsal settings.

BIO's

Opponent: 
David Barnett, professor 

David Barnett is Professor of Theatre at the University of York, UK. He previously taught at the University of Sussex, University College Dublin and the University of Huddersfield. He received his doctorate in German and Theatre Studies from St Anne’s College, Oxford. 
David is a specialist in postdramatic, German and political theatre, and theatricality, although he has also published on theatre documentation, documentary theatre, British playwrights, and the relationships between theatre theory and practice. He has research strengths in the theatres of Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Müller and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He is also a theatre practitioner who specializes in Brechtian stagecraft and has consequently directed practice-research productions and held practical workshops in several countries. 

Committee: 
Kristina Hagström-Ståhl, Ph.D. 

Kristina Hagström-Ståhl holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and currently works as the Scientific Adviser for Artistic Research for the Swedish Research Council, as well as a theatre director and translator. She works at the intersection of discursive and creative practices, with research interests in feminist and decolonial theory, performance studies, dramaturgy and mise en scene, translation, as well as questions of testimony and memory. Kristina has held positions as Professor at the Faculty of 
Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg, Visiting Associate Professor in Theatre and Performance Studies, Stockholm University, Visiting Professor at Stockholm University of the Arts, and Head of the Unit for Strategy, Analysis and Knowledge at Sweden's National Touring Theatre (Riksteatern). She has served on Gothenburg City Theatre's artistic advisory board and was previously a member of the Swedish Research Council's Committee for Artistic Research, as well as a board member of the Association of Nordic Theatre Scholars. She has been Hildeman Fulbright Fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle, and the recipient of an individual grant from Riksbankens Jublieumsfond for excellence in criticism and essays. 

Chrysa Parkinson, professor 

Chrysa Parkinson identifies as a dancer. She comes from North American and Northern European dance communities where she has been working for forty years as a performer. Her artistic inscriptions include the proscenium stage, queer communities, and somatic practices – the combination of which manifest as a deep respect for both poetry and camp, a queasy relation to categories, and an ongoing pleasure in redefining virtuosity through experimentation. Since 2011, Chrysa has been working as a Professor of Dance at Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH), where she directed the New Performative Practices Master education for many years, and is now Head of Subject for Dance. Her research focuses on how dance situates itself in practitioners’ lives and how performers, in turn, author, dismantle and reconstitute worlds. Chrysa is currently leading the research project Authorship Ownership and Control: dancers’ roles and materials (AOC). Hosted by SKH and funded by the Swedish research council, AOC will be completed in 2027. 

Egill Heiðar Anton Pálsson, professor 

Egill Heiðar Anton Pálsson is an icelandic actor, theatre director and professor in acting and theatre directing. He has been Head of Department for Acting at Iceland Academy of the Arts, Directing Teacher at The Danish National School of Performing Arts, and Professor and Head of Department for Theatre Directing and at Ernst Busch University of Theatre Arts Berlin. He was Artistic Director at Hålogaland Teater in Tromsø, Norway from 2020 to 2025, and is currently Artistic Director at Reykjavik City Theater. Over the last 25 years, he has directed about 75 professional theatre productions in the Nordic Countries and Germany. 

Substitute
Martin Sonderkamp, professor 

Martin Sonderkamp is a Professor of Choreography at Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH), where he is involved in the Department of Dance and Dance Pedagogy. His work often explores interdisciplinary connections between dance, visual arts, and music, and he is known for engaging in collaborative and experimental projects. 
He studied at the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in Amsterdam and has lived in various cities including Amsterdam, Istanbul, and Berlin. His choreographic practice includes social choreography, mixed media installations, and scores for extemporary performances. Sonderkamp is also recognized for his improvisational skills, having performed at festivals and venues across Europe and the U.S. 

PhD project by Johannes Maria Schmit