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    • Artist Leadership Training Program
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YOUR CART

IMMERSION 3.0: VR Creation Lab
June 2 - June 22, 2019
Cucalorus, Wilmington, NC
Tuition $1250 *includes food, lodging and technical support for VR production | tuition and travel subsidies available 

This summer, The School of Making Thinking will run IMMERSION 3.0, our third iteration of our 360° video creation lab. The IMMERSION 3.0 Residency at Cucalorus will be an opportunity to explore immersion as a part of artistic practice, develop immersive works and become acquainted with the emerging media, build deep relationships in community, and develop methods of organizing creative projects in connection with social justice and peaceful futures.

Building on the belief that meaningful work is born out of a deep sensitivity for the context from which it emerges, we will immerse ourselves on every level. We will be building group rapport through collective experiences and embodied workshops, intimately collaborating on and co-mentoring creative processes, and conducting micro research projects into Wilmington’s present and past in order to deepen the context and content of the pieces produced. By engaging the history of our surroundings, wondering about the standing communities, observing architecture and local lore, acknowledging the original caretakers of the land and local Indigenous communities, and the legacies of cultural production that make Wilmington what it is today, we collectively ask the questions: What layers of historical, cultural, colonial, oppressive, personal and social fabrics map onto our movements in a space? How might we engage these realities actually, and virtually?

The first week of the session will be focused on group and site introductions, as well as developing technical familiarity with the cameras and gear. In the second week, we will create immersive pieces of performance and 360° videos in chosen locations throughout the city. The third week will be devoted to post production of the video pieces created with technical support from ARVR Consultants, culminating in a work-in-progress sharing of videos and any projects intended as a live experience.

We are seeking participants who have capacity to engage in an intensive production schedule, interest in developing skills and familiarity with the emerging media of 360 video and virtual reality, and a desire to work within local communities and contexts. Prior experience with 360° cameras and technology will not be required. Session participants will have access to 360° video capture cameras as well as technical support during the shooting and editing process. Please note that IMMERSION 3.0 does not provide computer workstations, and participants should be prepared to work from their own machine if they have access to one. Pieces created at the residency will have the opportunity to exhibit at the VR Expo at the Cucalorus Film Festival in November 2019. Residents will be encouraged to return to participate as exhibiting artists.  
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Over the last two years, The School of Making Thinking has led the IMMERSION Lab in partnership with Cucalorus Film Festival and ARVR Consultants. The 360° video pieces that emerged have been tremendous: work born of intensive collective experience, cutting edge technical support, focused idea incubation, and challenging conversations in community.

IMMERSION FACILITATORS 

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Sara Fenton

Sara Fenton creates films, plays, and dances.  And sometimes poutine, too. Her professional dance and acting background make her an actor’s director with an eye for blocking, camera movement and choreography.  "I think truth and humor are the best way into any story," Fenton explains, "and I find myself drawn to adorably inept characters." Fenton got her start in production as coordinator for the documentary series Canadian Geographic Presents... and has since brought to the stage Take me to the Poorhouse, Rise and Shine [I thought I was White] and the monthly storytelling series Rant & Rave now in its 11th year.  As part of the team at the USC Media Institute for Social Change, Sara champions the use of media as a vehicle for activism.  She worked as Director’s Assistant for Obie Award winning theatre director, Jo Bonney for the world premiere of Rules of Seconds and is currently Director’s Assistant on the 2nd season of the Emmy Award winning Netflix series Making A Murderer. She’d like another DA gig to make it a hat trick/triple crown... or something to get her closer to the directors chair so that she could have her own assistant. When not producing Dawn of the Dumb, a zombie musical about climate change, Sara can be found developing other comedic works like Dirty Filthy Love Story, a dark rom-com about hoarders or The Godmother, a parody of The Godfather skewering sexism in Hollywood. Sara is an alumnus of the Directors Lab West at Pasadena Playhouse, a company member at Rogue Machine Theatre, and a writer for Backstage.com. Peer into the inner working of Sara’s mind to see what her husband describes as "stories about characters who are comically unable to grasp things that the rest of the world gets effortlessly" by clicking HERE. 
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Matt Pearson

Matt is an artist and designer whose practice ranges from solo works to large scale collaborations in performance, fashion, music, and research. Recent design projects include the interactive exhibit for HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness, Season 1, Adidas’s Harden, Volume 3, and the opening of Domino Park in Brooklyn, NY. As a designer and researcher, Matt has worked on projects with Dell Technologies, ArtRx, Toyota, The San Francisco Arts Commission, Episcopal Community Services for the Homeless, Autodesk, Kaiser Permanente, and Moet & Chandon, and he is currently funded for research of human computer interactions at Cornell Tech. As an actor and musician, Matt has performed at The Vineyard Theater (NY), Yale Repertory Theater, HERE Arts, The Kennedy Center, The Shakespeare Theater, Arena Stage, New Orleans Fringe Festival, and DC Capital Fringe Festival. Matt studied theater at Northwestern University, fine art at the Smithsonian Institute, and Interaction Design at California College of the Arts. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, where his homestead includes a microfarm with egg-laying hens.
www.mattpearsonworkshop.com
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Emma Jaster

Emma is a director, choreographer, and teaching artist based in NYC.  She has led projects with U-Theatre in Taiwan, the Natanakairali Institute in India, Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, LaMama’s Directors’ Symposium, and the Grotowski-based Teatr Zar in Poland.  She has taught for IDEO, MoMA, Cornell Tech, and Georgetown University.  She is the recipient of multiple grants and fellowships to create original work, including a HARP artist residency at HERE Arts, an artist fellowship from the DCCAH, and a space grant at BAX. Her work has been hailed as “the kind of performance for which the 21st century is going to be very hungry.”  Grounding her work in social justice and the cultivation of peace, she believes in the power of art to teach us to listen better and love more. She runs an international artist residency for mothers whose work can be found under @mamaisamaker.  She performed from childhood with her father, acclaimed mime Mark Jaster, and attended the Lecoq school for physical theatre in Paris. www.emmajaster.com

THE BODY OF WATER: Experimenting with Form in Playwriting
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May 25 - June 9
Community Forge, Pittsburgh, PA
Tuition $600 
*includes food and lodging | tuition and travel subsidies available ​ 

This residency will create a space for experimenting with the emergent development of a playwriting methodology based on bodies of water. By the end, each resident will work to produce two things: (1) a proposal for a dramaturgical form (story shape) or a writing practice inspired by water or water-related phenomena, and (2) a piece of dramatic writing that follows that form or practice. Residents may, but don’t have to, write plays about water—we are primarily interested in letting water inform the shape of plays, not their content.

We will study the anatomy of bodies of water (rivers, oceans, springs, lakes, perhaps icebergs—frozen bodies of water!), as well as their effects on social structures. We will look at water-related phenomena like flow, sedimentation, human and animal migration, flooding, and more; we’ll look at examples of performative work that engages waterways, biomimicry, and theorists/activists whose work draws on language around liquidity, emergence, and flow. Pittsburgh, at the confluence of three rivers, provides rich potential to engage embodied research as well. Through our Pittsburgh host site, Community Forge in Wilkinsburg, there will be the option for residents to interact with other artists, community organizations, and Wilkinsburg residents/youth.
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Here are some of the kinds of questions that interest us: What changes about site-specific performance or place-based research when the site/place is a body of water? What happens to a story if the plot diagram isn’t shaped like a mountain, but like a river or a lake or an ocean? How could a writer collaborate with water? How can a playwright collaborate with a scientist /collaborate with a painter in a way that’s fluid, that flows? What can playwrights learn from the way that water acts on us all at a distance and links us to other people and beings who appear geographically far away?
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The residency will focus on plays: we’ll work to translate our ideas to our playwriting process, from conception and research to writing and feedback. We welcome applications from anyone interested in working specifically with playwriting, whether you primarily identify as a playwright or you have a practice in another medium and you’d like to experiment with dramatic form. We also welcome applications from scientists, activists, scholars/researchers, and others who would like to collaborate with a playwright. We’ll be developing an experimental approach together, so it’s important that you’re interested in writing for the stage but also that you’re willing to challenge your own ideas about what makes a stage play work.
APPLY

THE BODY OF WATER FACILITATORS 

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Raven Cassell

Rooted in the art and investigation of storytelling, Raven Cassell is an actor, writer, educator and explorer. Her short stories and plays call on history and step into the future in order to imagine and practice more harmonious ways of being. Her work looks to contribute to the development of the global conversation on black culture. As an educator, she uses theater to practice storytelling as therapy inviting anthropology  and most recently, biomimicry. She uses this experimental approach to storytelling as a means to advance the artform as well as practice cultural preservation. Music and visual arts are, too, aids in her process. Raven earned her BFA in Dramatic Arts at The New School for Drama  in 2017 with focus in acting and writing. She has performed in plays like Lynn Nottage’s By The Way, Meet Vera Stark, Euripides’ Orestes, various devised works and two self-produced and written plays: GIRL BLUE and Dust to Dust. She’s worked as an teaching artist in residence at Dramatic Need (South Africa). Her stories have been featured in SYLA Journal and 12st Journal as well as self-published work on RavenCassell.com.  “The theater has been a vehicle of transformation, the grounds where I could confront, explore and transgress my intersectional identities.”  – Raven Cassell
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Cory Tamler

Cory Tamler (www.corytamler.com) has created and participated in research-based performance projects in the United States, Germany, and Serbia, and has worked with museums and companies including the New Museum for Contemporary Art, The Civilians, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, James Gallery, Sprat Artistic Ensemble, Yinzerspielen, and the School of Making Thinking. A core artist with civic arts organization Open Waters (Maine), Cory has written a play about small-scale farming and a book of performance scores based on migratory fish. Cory was a Fulbright Scholar (Berlin) and her academic and critical writing and translations have been published in The Mercurian, Studies in Musical Theatre, Asymptote, Culturebot, The Offing, Extended Play, Howlround, and SCENA. As a Ph.D. student in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY, she studies open-ended artistic work from social practice to community-based theatre. She teaches in the Department of Theater at Brooklyn College and is a member of Commitment Experiment, an experimental performance collective in Brooklyn.
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Alex Viteri

Alex Viteri Arturo writes, performs and directs drama. From time to time, she collaborates as a dramaturge and/or performer for choreographers and visual artists. She likes to engage in interdisciplinary projects, nonlinear pieces, and community writing processes. She’s interested in the many ways we can come together, and the ethics and politics of community-based work, social and participative art. In 2015, Alex moved to New York for an MFA at Columbia University’s School of the Arts (Fulbright Scholar). During the summer of 2015, she devised a short theatre piece with migrant kids at LA CIMADE in the south of France. In 2016, she began a nowadays ongoing collaboration with Juliana Piquero, an Argentinian choreographer living and working in Berlin. That same year, she was a playwright in residence at Shanghai Theater Academy. Today, Alex is also a doctoral student in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and teaches at Hunter College.



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