Sturgeon's Other Law posterous

When In Dis Greggs (for Stella Duffy and with apologies to the ghost of William Shakespeare)

When in dis Greggs, with fortune & men's pies,

I all alone beweep my cut-crust taste ... 

And crumble frail lattice with its shortcrust ties

And burn my greedy mouth, and curse my haste

Wishing it cool, as to the train I lope

Filling like this, like this with pastry made

Desiring sausage rolls, or mushrooms taupe

All delicacies of the baker's trade

And in these thoughts, Tories again despising,

I think on VAT, and how the state

Like a bad parent, only one child loving

Steals from the poor to heap the wealthy's plate

For mushy peas and gravy such joys bring

That every worker eating feels a king

 

 

 

And so it is my brother, by Yiannis Ritsos

For those who asked about the poem I read at the closing circle  on Monday at Devoted and Disgruntled 7. It was written by the Greek poet Yiannis Ritsos, and you'll find a recording at the link below of him reciting it intercut with Nikos Xilouris singing it to a melody by Christos Leontis. Below the video is my translation into English.

And so it is my brother
That we have learned to converse
Quietly, quietly and calmly
We understand each other now
No more is needed

And tomorrow I say we will become
Even more simple
We will find those words
That take the same weight
In all hearts
On all lips
So that we call
Figs figs
And the wash-tub wash-tub

So that others will smile
And say
"Poems like that,
I could write a hundred an hour"
And that's what we want
Because we do not sing
To stand apart, my brother
From people.
We sing
To bring people together

 

6 Day Comedia dell' Arte Workshop in Salford

6-day Comedia Dell'Arte workshop with Carlos Garcia Estevez of International Comedia Company Teatro Punto

 

Dates: 20th - 25th June

Venue: University of Salford
Times: 10 - 6 daily
Max number of participants: 20

 

Prices: Comedia Dell'Arte :  Concession £165
Full Price £195

 

Teatro Punto MODERN COMMEDIA DELL’ ARTE WORKSHOPS
This workshop consists of:

• Movement analysis

• Physical transformation/metamorphoses

• From tragedy to comedy

• Musicality and timing

• Mask and archetypical characters

• Improvisation and scene composition - Canovaccio

• Study of interaction between actor and audience

 

Teatro Punto workshops are designed for professional actors and for theatre
academies such as the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York and the
Arnhem acting school.  Besides teaching at Theatre schools worldwide, Teatro
Punto organizes open intensive workshops in the Netherlands and in Spain.

 

Carlos Garcia Estevez is the founder and artistic leader of Teatro Punto. He
trained for 3 years with Jacques Lecoq at the Ecole International do Theatre
and at the Laboratoire de Movement (LEM). Carlos is curently performing in
Complicite's A Dogs Heart directed by Simon McBurney.

 

Please contact us on therednoseacademy@gmail.com

Join our facebook group 'Clown Lab' for up to date info!

 

 

Experiments in crowdscripted performance

I call it crowdscripted performance.

Basically, my motivation is that most of the uses of webtech I've seen in theatre tend to undermine either the liveness of the experience, or the artistic expression of actors, or both. These being pretty much my favourite aspects of theatre, this tends to annoy me theoretically. It also annoys me professionally; as an actor, I'm looking for more artistic respect, not less. So I tried to think of a way to use digital interactivity that would be interesting for actors, and this is what I came up with:

The overriding idea is to use webtech to expand the theatre into digital space, by allowing a remote audience to affect what happens in the performance, while also allowing room for improvisation. The model is the kind of improvisation game pioneered by Keith Johnstone (I can find you examples if you want more detail), usually now used from improvistional comedy, though I'm not very keen to go down the comedy route. 

Imagine a theatre in which behind the performance space and on two sides, you have projection screens with text. The actors wouldn't know their lines ahead of time, but would read them off the screens in real time. There'd also be  a live feed of the action to a website. There are several ways it could work:

1. Each actor would be assigned a writer. They'd have to speak each line given to them, but could improvise action (maybe add extra lines too). This way actors and writers would all be improvising together, towards a particular end (making the scene creepy, or sad, or funny, say).

2. Roughly the same, only each actor/writer team would be competing against the others to achieve a given objective. Who can, seamlessly, steal x object say, without breaking the conceit of the scene. In this way the actors would be semi-autonomous avatars in an online game.

3. Classics rewritten. The projected texts wold be ones that everyone knows, the audience, reomote and otherwise (or assigned writers, as full audience freedom usually results in fart jokes and 'show us yer tits*",  would be invited to change them as they happened, so that you might start with the balcony scene from r & j and end upwith them robbing a bank, or killing the nurse or Juiet realising she's in love with the nurse or whatever.

These are just 3 different way it could go, I can think of several more. The dealbreaker for me is it that actors have to be both free and challenged, and that it opens out the theatre to greater (not necessarily remote)  audience  participation.

* I've tried some experiments, not terribly well though out, in solo crowdscripted performance that bear this out and demonstrate some of the perils. If you're interested, they're documented in a series of blog posts starting here.

Curious to see what you think, and possibly not explaining it very well,

Aliki

 

A woman puts on make-up, tights, a dress. Another woman, watching her, talks about growing up as a tomboy in a distant country, what she knew about girls and boys, women and men. A young man with a guitar sings about being a woman engineer and the demands of professional and family life.  The first woman removes her dress and makeup then straps down her breasts and applies a beard to her face before wearing a suit. The second woman talks about adolescence, wearing dresses and being catcalled and propositioned on the streets as a teen.

 

Don’t Assume is an autobiographical feminist piece about the importance of clothing and language in the performance of gender. What is a lady? What is a gentleman? What are these identities made of and how and when are they constructed? 

Clown Lab Summer Masterclasses in Salford

 

Workshop Block A

 

5-day Neutral mask workshop with Debra Stych and Heriberto Montalban of Lispa (London International School of Performing Arts)

Dates: 13- 17th June

Times: 10-5 daily
Venue: University of Salford
Max number of participants: 20

 

Prices: Neutral Mask
Early Bird/Concession £150
Full Price £180

 

6-day Comedia Dell'Arte workshop with Carlos Carcia Estevez of International Comedia Company Teatro Punto

Dates: 20th - 25th June

Venue: University of Salford
Times: 10 - 6 daily
Max number of participants: 20

 

Prices: Comedia Dell'Arte
Early Bird/Concession £165
Full Price £195

 

Workshop Block A Prices: Both Neutral Mask and Comedia Dell'Arte
Early Bird/Concession: £280
Full Price: £310

 

 

Workshop Block B*

11-day Clown and Devising Clown material workshop with master teacher John Wright

Dates: 11th - 15th July "Who let you in here" (Sat 16th & Sun 17th off)
18th - 23rd July "Writing for Idiots"
Venue: University of Salford
Times: 10 - 5 daily

Workshop Block B Prices: John Wright Clown and Clown devising workshop

Early Bird/Concession: £280
Full Price: £310

Workshop information and information about the teachers:

Neutral Mask


The Neutral Mask, one of the cornerstones of LISPA’s pedagogy, aims to
prepare the performer’s awareness for this poetic dimension of the human
experience. Through physical embodiment of the natural world in all its
different expressions, the performer develops a deeper transparency for
those dynamic life forces which dominate - both at the core of the world
around, and also within oneself.

The mask will help to essentialise natural movement, developing both calm
and risk-taking. It’s an open invitation for the actor to set aside their
personal emotions, physical attitudes and idiosyncrasies to completely
immerse themselves in a state of pure presence, in the now and here of
space.

  - The state of calmness and economy of movement
  - The dramatic qualities of the natural world
  - The relationship between motion and emotion
  - The poetic body

 

Debra and Heriberto trained with Thomas Prattki at The London International
School of Performing Arts.They are two of only a handful of people asked to
complete the pedagogical year at LISPA.
Debra teaches movement analysis and improvisation on the Initiation course
and Applied Techniques on the Advanced Course.
Heriberto teaches mask and improvisation on the Professional Development
programme and Foundation courses at LISPA.

 Comedia Dell'Arte*

 

Teatro Punto MODERN COMMEDIA DELL’ ARTE WORKSHOPS
This workshop consists of:

• Movement analysis


• Physical transformation/metamorphoses

• From tragedy to comedy

• Musicality and timing

• Mask and archetypical characters

• Improvisation and scene composition - Canovaccio

• Study of interaction between actor and audience

 

Teatro Punto workshops are designed for professional actors and for theatre
academies such as the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York and the
Arnhem acting school.  Besides teaching at Theatre schools worldwide, Teatro
Punto organizes open intensive workshops in the Netherlands and in Spain.

 

Carlos Garcia Estevez is the founder and artistic leader of Teatro Punto. He
trained for 3 years with Jacques Lecoq at the Ecole International do Theatre
and at the Laboratoire de Movement (LEM). Carlos is curently performing in
Complicite's A Dogs Heart directed by Simon McBurney.

 

Clown

Who let you in here?

 

Forget the circus clown the 'One hundred stupid things to do with a parcel'
approach to comedy. This is a course in clowning for actors. It is designed
to give you a daring quality of play and audacity within the context of a
structured dramatic situation

 

Writing for idiots

 

Clown is a vital key to our playfulness and our invention, with little
respect for form or convention what better place to start from if you want
to get to the heart of drama and narrative; to all those places where comedy
and stupidity rarely go? Writing for Idiots is a course in devising from
Clown.

 

John Wright is an internationally renowned teacher and director, he has
taught workshops all over the world and his book "Why is that so Funny" is a
must buy for actors, directors, students and teachers. John started up the
acclaimed theatre companies Trestle and Told by an Idiot. His version of
Dr.Faustus with theatre company IIIParty won The Peter Brook Award and the
show Fragility of X won a spirit of the fringe award at Edinburgh fringe

 

Please contact us on therednoseacademy@gmail.com

Join our facebook group 'Clown Lab' for up to date info!