PERFORMING • PLAYWRITING
Aug 2 - Aug 22 (dates revised)
tbd, NY
Tuition $900 *includes food and lodging
Writing works of live performance often means not just putting words on paper but also making images, arranging bodies in space, incorporating source material, improvising, and devising. Even a text with a single playwright’s name on it must transition from a solo to a collective writing process in design meetings and the rehearsal room. This session will consider, from the very beginning, what it means to incorporate the back-and-forth between solo and collective writing into the process. How does collective writing deepen, complicate, and strengthen works? How can performers be skilled contributors and creative agents in the writing process?
The session will lessen the divide between playwriting and workshopping, and performance ensemble building and devising. We will invite up to five playwrights, who will apply with a project proposal or early draft of a script along with a rationale for how it might benefit from a collective approach to revision. Ten performers will also join the session, both as subjects and as active agents and interlocutors, to simultaneously contribute to the development of the written work and undergo focused performance training and ensemble building. Within a collective writing process, we will be exploring the autonomy of the actor as artist and author, as well as subject. Our session will examine and subvert traditional and historical power dynamics within rehearsals, audition rooms, and theater spaces.
Participants will consider the methodology of playwrights, directors, and ensembles that incorporate some form of collective writing into their work and performance (for example: Mary Zimmerman, The Civilians, Cornerstone, She She Pop), and experiment with applying various techniques to their own voice and practice. Workshops drawing on performance techniques (for example: Meisner, Viewpoints and Suzuki, Clown, Theater of the Oppressed, Applied Theater, Action Theater, Butoh, and Grotowski) will explore the process of turning text into action, the possibilities of performance as activism, and the actor as advocate for social change.
Mutual mentorship, deep workshopping of material, group staging, devising, re-imagining, and improvisation will lead to the development of pieces of theater and live performance over the course of the residency. There will be an opportunity to show work produced in NYC in the Fall.
The session will lessen the divide between playwriting and workshopping, and performance ensemble building and devising. We will invite up to five playwrights, who will apply with a project proposal or early draft of a script along with a rationale for how it might benefit from a collective approach to revision. Ten performers will also join the session, both as subjects and as active agents and interlocutors, to simultaneously contribute to the development of the written work and undergo focused performance training and ensemble building. Within a collective writing process, we will be exploring the autonomy of the actor as artist and author, as well as subject. Our session will examine and subvert traditional and historical power dynamics within rehearsals, audition rooms, and theater spaces.
Participants will consider the methodology of playwrights, directors, and ensembles that incorporate some form of collective writing into their work and performance (for example: Mary Zimmerman, The Civilians, Cornerstone, She She Pop), and experiment with applying various techniques to their own voice and practice. Workshops drawing on performance techniques (for example: Meisner, Viewpoints and Suzuki, Clown, Theater of the Oppressed, Applied Theater, Action Theater, Butoh, and Grotowski) will explore the process of turning text into action, the possibilities of performance as activism, and the actor as advocate for social change.
Mutual mentorship, deep workshopping of material, group staging, devising, re-imagining, and improvisation will lead to the development of pieces of theater and live performance over the course of the residency. There will be an opportunity to show work produced in NYC in the Fall.