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This November, Warona Seane, joins us from South Africa with a workshop about Fictionalizing the Self.

Sign up for the Global Faculty Programme: Devising Self with Warona Seane

6 Sessions | 17th – 27th November | Every alternate day | 17:30 to 19:30 India   

Workshop Fees: Rs 7000/- 

Workshop Takeaways:

This workshop is about fictionalising the self. Through the exploration of a single story, the participants will be engaged in the beginning processes of crafting solo performances taken from the ordinary and known, to the extraordinary, fictional and theatrical.

• Deepening awareness of the self
• Intensely exploring possibilities of the mundane transforming into performance
• Conceptualizing a solo performance dramaturgically

About the Facilitator:

Warona Seane is an actor, director, producer and was the first Artistic Manager at Soweto Theatre between 2013-2015.

 In June of 2016, she was on a residency at Baltimore Centerstage and Blue Mountain Centre to develop a new production with US collaborators. She was the 2017 convenor of the Theatre programme for the National Arts Festival and holds an MA Dramaturgy from University of Cape Town, in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam. Ms. Seane taught at Wits School of Arts and the Market Theatre Laboratory has presented at the “Black Women in the Performing Arts Conference: Volume 1” at the Steve Biko Centre and the 10th Women Playwrights International Conference. 

Currently, she is a lecturer at UCT’s Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies (CTDPS). 

Warona Seane’s stage acting credits include: For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When The Rainbow Is Enuf (Fleur Du Cap 2002); The Alchemist’s Heart; Nothing but the Truth and Nongogo (Naledi nomination 2006). Tsela an adaptation of “Waiting for Godot”, Ukutshona ko Mendi: Did We Dance and Tin Bucket Drum. 

Ms. Seane’s directing credits include Sacred Thorn; Yes Medem; Nelisiwe Xaba’s solos Fragments of an Orgy; Mute Echoes and Romeo and Juliet, For Colored/Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf by Ntozakhe Shange; Eclipsed by Danai Gurira; We Are Here by Antonio Lyons, The Mountaintop by Katori Hall (Naledi Best Director nomination 2013) Hani for the Gauteng Opera’s Cula Mzansi and OoMaSisulu which premiered in the Main at NAF 2016, Sibongile Khumalo’s More Than Three Faces and Our Story Magic by Gcina Mhlophe for the Playhouse Theatre, Nineveh devised from an academic paper, The Visit (co-direction with Mark Fleishman) in 2018 and Susan-Lori Parks’ Venus in 2019. 

Ms. Seane’s credits as a Dramaturge include Iyazika, Here To There and Seriti. 

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

When the year 2020 began, nobody could have prophesied that just three to four months in, the whole world will be forced to lock themselves in because of fear of a contagion: the novel coronavirus. For theatre practitioners, this was a curveball which took them some time to navigate. The first response was of shock, followed by a migration to the virtual world. What seemed like a stop-gap measure earlier seems to be accepted as the norm now, with performances on Zoom and other platforms being looked at as the future.

What astonishes Giovanni Fusetti, artist, natural scientist and theatre pedagogue is the extraordinary speed with which the collective moved online. “At first it was like an emergency and a measure to just hold on. Then, it turned into adaptation to the new medium. By the third week of the lockdown, it turned into a sort of evolution, where there was progress. Now we look at it as the future,” exclaimed the founding director of the Helikos International School of Theatre Creation in Florence, Italy at a recent Unrehearsed Futures webinar.

As a Gestalt therapist, the first Gestalt or pattern that Fusetti sees in this process is the behavior that theatre-makers feel they can replace a lot of what they had before with what they can create on these “wonderful machines” such as the one you’re reading this from. “And this, for me, is pretty shocking. Soon they will tell us, ‘Remember in 2020, when we all moved online and then we never got out?’ Whoa, that was quick,” he expresses, calling it a retrospective prophecy or retrophecy, as Amy Russell terms it, about the present moment.

Abandoning the Natural Space

This detachment from the physical world has been a slow and gradual process, according to Fusetti, and has its roots in the earliest philosophies of Parmenides and Plato. As someone who loves diving into etymology, Fusetti points out that the word physics and physical come from the Greek work physis which means ‘nature’. “So this story of the progressive abandonment of the physis, of nature is very, very long,” he begins.

Parmenides, a Greek philosopher, is also thought to be one of the earliest founders of metaphysics, a branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things and includes abstract concepts such as identity, being, knowing, time etc. In 5^th century BC, Parmenides came to the conclusion “…for thinking and being are the same thing” in his only written work, entitled On Nature.

Following this, Plato, one of the greatest classical Greek philosophers, in his theory of Forms, said that the visible world is not reality but that the real reality is ideas and exists in the mind, which he called idealism. “And those people created something called metaphysics, ‘beyond physics, beyond nature. And the problem that I have is that there is a rank and value system in this,” says Fusetti. To explain this, he discusses the binary of virtual reality as opposed to “real” reality, saying that in the current use of these terms the virtual has a rank over the real. The word virtual comes from virtuous which has its origins in the Latin word virtus, meaning ‘virtue’ or ‘of value’, and actually contains the word vir, man, so it specifically refers to manly qualities. So, Fusetti believes, one begins to hear the virtual versus real debate where these terms are not neutral and the virtual world is seen with awe and wonder and “considered to be better than the real world which has physical constraints such as eating, breathing and pooping.”

He also dives into his Christian upbringing in Italy where he was taught that “In the beginning was the word” (John 1:1). “We come to life wailing, ‘Waaawaa’. Is that the word?” he asks. Fusetti disagrees with the Christian doctrine and further says that the Renaissance in Italy was a series of models which postulates the superiority of the intellect over nature. “So the Italian garden is an expression of complete control of nature and wilderness, where wilderness is considered to be regressive, primordial and fundamentally evil. What I see happening is that the virtual is becoming a world of fantasy and delusion and that is coming from the idea that we can be in charge of the world through our mind, through the digital medium, and not through the body,” explains Fusetti, who is also a Lecoq practitioner.

He goes on to quote French philosopher René Descartes’ famous Latin statement Cogito, ergo sum, which translates to “I think, therefore I am.” Recalling a high school joke where Fusetti and his classmates twisted it to Coitus, ergo sum and says that it is coitus that brought him to physical theatre and therefore, for him, in the beginning was a gesture. “And the word will appear from the body, and not vice versa,” he says.

What disturbs him most is how much humans want to control everything. “It is intense and makes me quite angry when I talk about it, because behind this virtual world, there is an epidemic of control, which I find more complicated and more dangerous than the COVID pandemic,” he says, giving an example of a movement called transhumanism, where people are waiting to upload their brains onto a hard disk and live immortally or chop their heads off after their death to preserve it frozen in a hangar in Arizona, US.

Being a Mammal in a Digital Zoo

Fusetti terribly misses being in a live physical space interacting with others in his natural eco-system. His body is his home, his oikos (the Greek origin of the word ‘ecology’) which is an intrinsic part of nature because he is in contact with the eco-system around him. “I need social contact. I need physical contact with other humans. And I am a mammal. I’m amazed of how little we are talking about our needs as mammals in this time of lockdown,” he says.

“As a mammal, I spend the first part of my existence inside another mammal, which is my mom. And then I come out of it and for a very long and incredibly significant time, I am completely physically intertwined with another human being. And then my body includes her and my family, my house, my toys, my pet. We all remember that. The life of a child is an ecosystem of physical interactions,” he explains, adding that due to this abandonment of the natural needs of one’s body and ecology while theatre practitioners migrate online is resulting in abandoning the natural space.

“And this can have terrible consequences because we are not engaging with the actual caring of the physical space around us. I’m disturbed by this because I see that this migration to the digital medium as a very bizarre decision that doesn’t respond to my needs as a mammal.”

Every time he wears the words ‘pandemic’ and “social distancing”, Fusetti says his mammal brain screams hysterically and misses his embodiment as a physical theatre practitioner tremendously. “I miss it physically,” he says, “I study myself lduring these times and I notice that when there is a gesture emerging in me, a class, a project, an act, I realize that I can’t do that. I could do something else but then I realize I can’t do that either. It feels like a wave of excitation that cannot manifest in the embodied interactive world.” He adds that this ‘can’t happen’ realization becomes a sort of a low-key depressive state for him.

“I love that we can have an interaction through these machines. But this is a surrogate to something that I am terribly starving for. And I’m cultivating that craving because that craving makes me feel that I’m still alive. The moment I stop craving and accept junk food, I’m in trouble,” he states.

With all the Zoom interactions, Fusetti believes that he is a part of something but can’t find the words to describe it. “Because I constantly connect with how I feel when I’m sitting here in front of the machine and there is a mix of excitement of being in contact. There is joy in seeing faces of people I know and love and there is the distress of not being able to reach out. So, there is a mixture of joy and of animal terror,” he explains, adding that when a Zoom call gets over, he feels excited that he was with a collective but finds it bizarre when his body notices the absence of that collective at the same time.

The Collective Poetic Body

Staying true to the sanctity of the natural and physical space, Fusetti made the conscious decision to suspend any sort of physical theatre training of new students online with through his Helikos International School of Theatre Creation. Not taking the position of a naysayer, but in defense of the pedagogy of the poetic body, he wrote in an article in May (http://www.helikos.com/pages/workshops-details.php?post=121&lang=en) that there is no such thing as a virtual physical theatre, just as there isn’t virtual gardening or virtual hiking. Stating that the virtual cannot replace the authentic, he wrote, “We can practice a live embodied art online as long as we are aware that it is a surrogate of the real experience. As long as we frame it as such.”

While he believes that one can do online training in online performing, he feels poetic space and time cannot be taught to new students of theatre through the virtual medium. “In years of my practice of the Lecoq’s approach, one of the biggest realizations I had was that the poetic body is collective. It is not individual. That’s why all the experience of chorus, of band, of flocking, of buffon or just the whole ensemble concept is so powerful. It includes not just my body, but the bodies of my fellow performers, the body of the audience, the props, the space, the stage. So, the body is like quantum physics. It is like a wave, not a particle. That, for me, needs to be preserved. That is the part of the theatrical process that gets filtered out in digital media, because we cannot hold that,” he asserts, while adding that one can hold some space but it is not possible to co-regulate one’s emotions between the performers and audience.

Fusetti also believes that the universal comfort in disembodiment is the result of the global trauma that lives in the physical body. “One of the consequences of trauma is the abandonment of the body, of the numbness of the body. So I think that it is evident that we are collectively living with a lot of collective trauma of all kinds. We need to bring back to the people the tools of healing and therapy on a large scale,” he says.

One of the ways in which theatre practitioners can work on healing is to work locally with the people around while being aware of the physical and emotional wounds present. “And they appear in the form of gestures,” he says, “I wish there was more collective political and educational awareness of this particular question, because I don’t see any at all. And this is disturbing. I think it comes back to what I was saying in the beginning that this process of disembodiment is certainly helped by the fact that we might feel safer online because the intensity of the contact and the potential conflict is less. Any encounter with ‘the ‘other’ brings and transformation of the self, and this can be scary, especially if, due to my emotional wounds, I have become protective and somehow conservative of my identity  ”

Ecstasy through Theatre

There have been pandemics much worse than this and theatre has always survived and come back stronger. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, Fusetti feels that when things do open up more, there could be a decreased demand for live entertainment. While this need for entertainment has been fulfilled by Netflix and other platforms, theatre as a form will have to become even more theatrical to make it clear it cannot be replaced with anything else. He also notes that historically, at the end of pandemics, there have been records of great celebrations, parties and festivals in cities and even orgies.

“So they were looking for ecstasy: physical ecstasy. This is a fact. They’re not going to come to see Hamlet after the pandemic is over unless Hamlet is done in a very wild, ecstatic way. So, what I’m saying here is that we need to think in terms of what kind of ecstatic physical experience we can provide to people who have experienced extended physical and emotional deprivation and the fear of death, and need to celebrate the euphoria of not being dead and being together again. As a practitioner, you have to come out with something pretty cool. Otherwise, people are not going to come to see a show,” he says, before signing off.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

When the world went into lockdown in early March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, theatre pedagogues were at loss to understand how they were going to teach theatre online. While many drama schools around the world reluctantly began dabbling in the medium, there was always a nagging question about how a tactile, somatic subject like theatre could be taught over a screen in the absence of “presence”.

For pedagogues, it also turned into a time to introspect their teaching philosophies. Is teaching acting techniques on Zoom and other interfaces screen acting? Should drama schools now call themselves “creativity schools” or schools where screen work is also taught? How does one create pedagogy for a time of perpetual disruption? Can such teaching be called theatre at all?

Edward Hicks, Principal of The Oxford School of Drama (OSD), has been working in theatre and television since the age of nine. In the span of his long career, he also ventured into institutions like East15 Acting School and the Royal Academy for Dramatic Art (RADA), traditionally theatre schools, and looked at how screenwork could be integrated into traditional actor training in drama schools. He believes there are crossovers between the two performance areas.

So when the pandemic was declared, Hicks felt that it wasn’t only about different voices and stories now, but it was also about how one tells those stories. “So, rather than be intimidated by the idea of lockdown and, and all the consequences of that, I actually found this really exciting, because suddenly here is an opportunity to do something that has never been done before. That’s fun. That’s scary but exciting,” he said during a recently held Unrehearsed Futures webinar on Zoom.

“I don’t see why drama schools can’t carry on. This is an exciting opportunity to challenge ourselves,” he says, adding that OSD has gone through the online teaching process and socially-distanced teaching in the physical space. “And I’m pleased to say that we have managed to do four in house productions, some with an audience, most without and the majority outside. But it has all been staged with social distancing,” he shares.

A large concern for most drama schools has been renegotiating the social contract of a school with students in these times. Given that the ability to perform in live spaces has been taken away for the foreseeable future, what are pedagogues preparing students for?

To answer that, Hicks says it is necessary to ask oneself what is a drama school. “For me, drama school isn’t just theatre training. It is for training professional actors. And if you want to train an actor for now and the future, it cannot just be theatre,” he believes.

He believes that drama schools must be a breeding ground for new content of any form: be it films, radio, theatre and other areas where students are encouraged to make their own work. “And, I think, drama schools need to offer a moment within the training where they can try out some of those ideas, experiment and possibly even get them badly wrong so that students can learn how to do them better next time,” he says.

One of the things Hicks did during the lockdown was to direct a film written, performed and shot by his students. The students were a little nervous about it initially and some said they didn’t know how to write or make a film. So he gave them a provocation and said that all characters had to interact over Zoom. They were then split up into smaller groups. The groups discussed and brainstormed ideas. Meanwhile, one of their movement tutors worked with students in a physical way to try and unlock more ideas. The film was shot using Zoom and some additional cameras, which in most cases was a mobile phone. “Some students were working in spaces that were so limited, that the second camera was essentially another close-up. Others had more space. So the second camera position could be much wider. And, so essentially, we’ve ended up in a situation where the students wrote, devised, shot, and acted in this film,” he says. One of the students got so excited by the project they even edited some of the footage. “Encouraging our students to create more content and come up with new ideas about what the future could be, is instrumental to the learning process,” he adds.

In terms of teaching, one of the decisions Hicks and his colleagues took was to not shift everything to Zoom, which turned out to be beneficial. “You have to accept there are blocks of work in your curriculum that just won’t work on Zoom. Contact improvisation one of the movement classes for instance, was not going to work on Zoom. So, we’ve moved it to a different stage of the curriculum. And we hope that we can put that in at a later date,” he says.

However, there were some blocks of work, such as clowning, which worked surprisingly well on Zoom. “A lot of the clowning classes became about the individual actors’ or clowns’ space, and they explored that screen space to play in,” he says. During an exercise the clowning tutor made the students play ‘hide and seek’ in the space as seen on each individual’s Zoom frame. Some had a lot of depth, some had none, but it was interesting to watch how students played with the space available to them, around them, says Hicks.

By keeping clowning on Zoom, it opened up a whole new area of experimentation and play which students brought to the floor when they came back into physical spaces. Instead of putting in a whole unit on clowning, the school decided to have a workshop in the physical space so that students have some experience of clowning in the physical space. In fact, he found the work so interesting that he says he is almost tempted to keep it that way in the future.

In the course of their online teaching, students and tutors at OSD faced numerous challenges, especially in terms of space available for learning. Some students had very little space around them to do exercises. To accommodate this, Hicks and his colleagues at OSD devised a lot of independent study. Although there were many classes done live on Zoom, there were slots of independent study as well. “For instance, our voice department had pre-recorded material that they would then send to the student. And the student can use that material to work in their own time. Then they would come back to a class where there would be a one to one tutorial over Zoom to look at that work,” Hicks shares.

This also meant that there were lots of gaps over the course of the week. “On Mondays, there tended to be no teaching at all,” he says. “So if we had students who had relatives to help look after, or had to go shopping for someone or because we didn’t know what was going to happen with lockdown back then, the students felt they had space to do other things outside of school. And that became really, really important.”

This arrangement also allowed space for students to negotiate using the living room, for example, during class hours. Some students chose to do independent study at night when their parents and siblings were asleep.

Availability of physical space is crucial to learning theatre. OSD found that with some students, their performance in animal studies at home was of course different to how they would be in the physical space. “There are some people for whom the thought of doing animal studies with mum and dad next door is just too embarrassing.” he shares.

Hicks believes that a lot of learning happens outside classrooms in cafeterias and coffee bars when students discuss what they have been taught and how they experienced it. That became difficult to replicate in an online space after each class or day. So, alongside the more formal tutorials, students had group sessions every week, where they all checked-in with themselves and each other. “It wasn’t a class. It was a kind of informal chat. And it was really, really valuable because it turned into a sort of reflection on the work, which is important, to remind them of the process. It was also useful because it helped create that sense of community. And one of the problems with Zoom is people feel very isolated,” he says.

The pandemic has also forced institutions to change themselves and their philosophies to suit the changing times. And it is harder when one doesn’t have a definite shape of what the future might look like due to which one is robbed of the ability to plan. “I think if you try and plan for every eventuality, you’ll just go mad because where do you stop? After the millionth plan? So, I think you have to be ready to respond quickly to the situation that is developing because everything is changing so fast,” believes Hicks.

“It’s being ready to adapt and willing to adapt. I think we have to accept these are highly unusual times and just be honest with the students. I mean, (OSD) students have been involved in this right through the process. To give you an example, when we told them that if you’re to come back into the space, you have to come back to your home in Oxford two weeks before we open to form a new bubble, and be in isolation, so that we know that you are safe to come back to the school. That takes a real commitment from our students,” he feels.

OSD brought students back into the physical space once the UK government announced that schools could open with social distancing norms in place. This worked well for a private institution like OSD because they’re a small organization, says Hicks. What also aided their decision to reopen was the fact that the school is set up on a converted farm with lots of space outside. “As soon as they (the UK government) announced the two-metre distance learning guidelines, we immediately were able to hire a whole lot of marquees, put them all up around the grounds and subdivide the groups. Now we can do that, as it is really simple and easy for us, as we have the space,” he explains.

OSD also decided to stagger the start and end dates of the different courses and delayed the start of their two-term foundation course in acting by a term, which automatically gave them more space. Keeping in mind the social distancing norms, they’ve also hired additional spaces for teaching and rehearsals for the coming year and have strict COVID protocols in place. Students will come back early for some socially distanced face-to-face teaching under strict COVID 19 protocols before the school sends them off-site into a more traditional rehearsal mode for a socially distanced production. But all while adhering to strict COVID 19 protocols.

“We found a space that’s big enough so they can rehearse in with social distancing in place. The play will be blocked with social distancing. And when they’re off-site doing that, the new students will then arrive so we can give them face to face socially distanced teaching,” shares Hicks, adding that they’ve done so to ensure that they are able to do more face-to-face teaching on-site.

“And we’re sticking with the two meters distance,” he further adds. “We’ve put grids everywhere. So every student stands in a room knowing that they are safe if they are in a particular square, because even though spatial awareness is important for an actor, we just want to make sure they know.”

When students came back to work in the same space, Hicks found they had a completely different energy about them. While he doesn’t wish a pandemic-like situation to happen every year, some students realized what they were missing and what they might have perhaps taken for granted. “And my god, they’re throwing themselves into the work now on a whole other level, not that they didn’t before. But now they really, really value it. And that’s just lovely to see,” he says, beaming.

Surprisingly, there were some students who found certain blocks of work easier on Zoom than in the physical classroom. Students who compared themselves to each other in the classroom earlier, found that they were not doing so on Zoom since they were operating from their own space, at home. The medium forced them to pull the focus on themselves.

While it is important to adapt in this sea of change, Hicks feels one must not let go of the major tenets of actor training because essentially one wants actors who are truthful and connected. “There are tools that we are teaching our students. And those tools are kind of the Holy Grail, if you like: the mining of the text, the explanation of the Stanislavski work, Uta Hagen, laban and many others. These are the fundamentals. I think, moving forward, we just have to be a little bit better at explaining why some of these things are important and where they’re still relevant. I think sometimes some generations, some students may perhaps not always get that” he asserts, adding that it is also vitally important to include much more diverse texts in the curriculum and to balance the classical work with more contemporary work.

More than anything it is crucial to keep creating a community and mining the best out of this moment. Going forward, there might be things one will miss from this pandemic, such as allowing oneself to be vulnerable in front of others, even if through a screen. As pedagogues, it is one’s responsibility to create those spaces for communication among students and give them space to express themselves creatively. Because there will come a time when people will be allowed to congregate in the same space again and the theatre community will come back stronger than ever.

Voice Coach Barbara Houseman has worked with Kenneth Branagh, Jude Law and Daniel Radcliffe among others. Join her for September’s Global Faculty Programme.  

6 Sessions | Every Friday | 18 Sep – 23 Oct | 11:30 am – 1:30 pm IST

Workshop Fees: Rs 7000/- 

APPLY NOW: https://forms.gle/4Tz4xHQFd5sCTwdw7 

Workshop Takeaways:

• Deepen your understanding of Body-Breath, Vocal Health & Energy (Support), Range, Vocal quality (Resonance) and Clarity
• Develop an in-depth understanding of your voice 
• Build an understanding of socio-emotional barriers in accessing your full vocal potential
• Apply this knowledge to develop and maintain your voice 

About Barbara Houseman:

The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama | The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School

Author of Finding Your Voice and Tackling Text | Visiting professor at the University of Tennessee and the University of Connecticut

Barbara Houseman’s career as a voice and acting coach and theatre director spans over 40 years. She worked alongside Cicely Berry in the Voice Department at the Royal Shakespeare Company and with Tim Supple as Associate Director at The Young Vic. 

She works as a voice-over artist and coaches journalists who narrate their own documentaries. She also coaches non-actors and individuals wishing to improve their communication skills. Barbara is a fully qualified Healing-Shiatsu Practitioner, an NLP Master Practitioner and a certified Clean Language Coach.

Barbara has worked extensively as a voice and text coach in the West End including shows including The Ferryman, Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Equus (The Gielgud). She has been Season Associate Director -Voice & Text at Open Air Theatre, Regents Park, London since 2014. Recently she has returned to directing working on a number of one-woman shows.

August brings Ellen Lauren and J. Ed Araiza from SITI Company, New York to DSM! Apply now for this truly unique opportunity to work with Suzuki Method and Viewpoints training.

17th August to 28th August | 6 sessions | 7 pm – 9 pm IST

Workshop Fees: Rs 7000/-

Apply for the Workshop: https://forms.gle/WpPHMkKR2nfnyg4Y9

WORKSHOP TAKEAWAYS

Week 1: Suzuki Method
– Understanding fundamental theories and vocabulary of the Suzuki Method of Training Actors
– Focussing on restoring the wholeness of the human body and voice to the theatrical context
– Uncovering the actor’s innate expressive abilities
– Training in a rigorous physical discipline that seeks to heighten the actor’s emotional and physical power
– Cultivating a sharper awareness of one’s own strength, stamina and concentration.

Week 2: Viewpoints Training
– Understanding Viewpoints, training that breaks the field of awareness into individual subjects, dealing with the actor/director’s tools of Time and Space, all of which overlap
– Looking at one’s environment through the noticing of spatial and temporal phenomena to widen the artist’s field of awareness and attention
– Practising being and noticing one thing at a time

Introduction to the Suzuki Method of Actor Training

Ellen Lauren training with SCOT in winter of 2016

The workshop will introduce fundamental theories and vocabulary of the Suzuki Method of Training Actors. Developed by internationally acclaimed director, Tadashi Suzuki and the Suzuki Company of Toga, the Suzuki Training’s principal concern is with restoring the wholeness of the human body and voice to the theatrical context and uncovering the actor’s innate expressive abilities. It is a foundational training for any creative endeavour an artist wishes to undertake and does not dictate a style of acting. It is a rigorous physical discipline that seeks to heighten the actor’s emotional and physical power and commitment to each moment on the stage. Attention is on the centre of gravity and a vocabulary of footwork. Attention is on the specificity of movement, speed, balance and the ability to apply ’the brakes’.

The training is also designed as a metaphysical check into the invisible world of the artist. Focus, concentration, rich inner fiction and energy are measured and made visible. It is a training in presence, deepening one’s relationship to the sensation of performance. Rigorous or deeply meditative, this training seeks to restore sensation to the art of performance.

Introduction to Viewpoints:

J. Ed Araiza training actors in Beijing

The workshop will introduce fundamental theories and vocabulary of Viewpoints.

A technique of movement improvisation, the Viewpoints grew out of the postmodern dance world. The Viewpoints were first articulated by choreographer Mary Overlie; who broke down the two dominant issues performers deal with—Time and Space—into six categories;

SPACE-SHAPE-TIME-EMOTION-MOVEMENT-STORY (SSTEMS).

Mary Overlie’s Viewpoint work deeply influenced the SITI Company’s and its productions, primarily directed by Anne Bogart. For over 28 years the SITI Company has trained together and continued to explore Mary’s original concepts. As practised by SITI the Viewpoints allows a group of actors, performers and artists to form vibrant ensembles that function together spontaneously and intuitively, and to generate bold, theatrical work quickly. It develops flexibility, articulation, and strength in movement and makes staging more efficient as well as broadening the range of dynamic possibilities.

The Viewpoints were invented to deconstruct theatre, dance, and the concept of performance within the western cultural framework; as such it supports and encourages both individual impulses as well as the ensemble and does not dictate a style of acting or performance. The SITI company continues to teach an evolving form of Viewpoints, inspired and informed by Mary’s work and thought.

The Viewpoints and the Suzuki Method do not constitute a style but a foundation on which to build a responsive, holistic instrument prepared to work in a wide range of performance styles and media.

The Viewpoints allow a group of actors, performers and artists to form vibrant ensembles that function together spontaneously and intuitively, and to generate bold, theatrical work quickly. It develops flexibility, articulation, and strength in movement and makes staging more efficient as well as broadening the range of dynamic possibilities. It supports and encourages both individual impulses as well as the ensemble.

The training is also a philosophical approach to rehearsal and performance.

About the Instructors:

J. Ed Araiza

J.Ed Araiza has a long and varied history working on multicultural, cross-disciplinary projects as a writer, director and performer. Mr. Araiza is a principal actor and original member of the SITI Company, founded by Tadashi Suzuki and Anne Bogart. SITI Company is one of the most important experimental theatre ensembles in the world. He is a proponent of The Suzuki Method and Viewpoints training and for over 28 years has performed in productions in major national and international venues. These include the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.; the Olympic Arts Festival in Atlanta; The Getty Villa in Malibu; the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Actors Theatre of Louisville; Los Angeles Theater Center; Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center; Harvard University’s American Repertory Theater; Scotland’s Edinburgh Festival; Germany’s Biennale Bonn festival; Japan’s Toga Festival; Ireland’s Dublin Theatre Festival; and Festival Le Standard Ideal, MC 93 Bobigny, in Paris.

SITI credits include: The Bacchae, The Persians and Trojan Women, Under Construction, Who Do You Think You Are, Hotel Cassiopeia, Midsummer Night’s Dream, bobrauschenbergamerica, Culture of Desire, The Medium, Small Lives/Big Dreams, War of the Worlds, The Radio Play, and Nicolas and Alexandra, RADIO MACBETH and LOST IN THE STARS

As a playwright with seven original full-length plays produced, Araiza is a member of the Dramatist Guild of America, Austin Script Works and NoPE (No Passport Required). He has directed sections of 365 Days/365 Plays at the New York Public Theatre; Voluspa for the National Theatre of Iceland; Savitri, Dancing in the Forest of Death for the META Theatre Festival in Delhi (nominated for best production and best director) and MEDEAstories, his original adaptation of the Euripides has been performed at TEAK in Helsinki, Finland and also with an international cast for the SITI Studio Theatre in New York.  His bilingual adaptation Miss Julia, based on Strindberg’ Miss Julie has been presented in several international venues including LA MAMA ETC in New York and the LATC’s Encuentro Festival in Los Angeles. 

Professor Araiza has been a guest teacher at many universities including at the Juilliard School, Yale School of Drama, SUNY Purchase, Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, Columbia University, NYU, Stanford University, National Theater Institute, Harvard University, University of Chicago, Pomona College, Vassar College and the University of Denver. He was artist-in-residence/guest faculty for three semesters over three years at St. Edward’s University in Austin Texas; and artist-in-residence/Coastal Studies Chair at Bowdoin College in Maine. He was also guest lecturer in acting and performance at Ontario’s University of Windsor. Other international workshops include those at the Singapore International Theatre Festival; South Korea’s Seoul Factory Theatre; the Norwegian Theatre Academy; the Icelandic Academy of the Arts; Festival Iberoamericano in Bogota, Columbia; Teatro Vertigo in Spain, and most recently at the National Theatre Academy in Warsaw, Poland.

Since 2013 Professor Araiza has served as head of the MFA Acting program at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, leading an interdisciplinary program based on collaboration and ensemble training. Ellen Lauren

Ellen Lauren:

Ellen Lauren is a founding member and co-artistic director of the SITI Company along with Anne Bogart, based in New York City. For thirty years, she has been an actor, choreographer, writer and director in the company. She also is the head of all of SITI’s training and educational programming including the New York studios and intensives, domestic and international residencies and SITI’s bi-annual Conservatory. 

She has been an associate artist with the SCOT Company (Suzuki Company of Toga) led by world-acclaimed director, Tadashi Suzuki for 40 years. She has taught and performed with SCOT, including running SCOT’s Summer Training program for 10 years. Touring over 35 countries over the decades in SCOT’s repertory, she has played Agave, Clytemnestra, Juliet, Jocasta and Goneril, and led workshops on behalf of SCOT. 

She is a founding member of the International Consortium on Suzuki Training for Actors and produced “Transformation through Training: 2017 International Symposium on SCOT and the Suzuki Training” at Skidmore College in New York where she produced SCOT’s last US tour of their renowned Trojan Women.

She has been an ongoing faculty member at the Juilliard School of Drama at Lincoln Center for over 20 years where she has also directed Iphigenia and Other Daughters and Trojan Women. Representative guest faculty positions include TEAC National Academy, Helsinki, Ecole Jacques Lecoq, Paris, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Carlos Universidad and Vertiço in Madrid, Soif Compagnie Paris, Maastricht School of the Arts, Windsor University, Banff Center for Arts and Creativity, Moscow Art Theatre and Beijing Academy. She was the first recipient of the Theatre Communications Group Fox Fellowship for Distinguished Achievement in the United States and is published in American Theatre Magazine (In Search of Stillness). Scott Cumming released a chapter in his book, Actor’s Actors, on her career and practice. 

She is currently working on her book, The Invisible Body.

Amy Russell was a pedagogic student of M. Jacques Lecoq in the nineties. Since then she has gone on to found not one, not two but three internationally recognized training programmes in physical theatre. She is also an award-winning playwright. And this month, the Global Faculty Programme offers you the chance to devise and write your own piece of performance art with her.

Rediscover boundless imagination within your living room from the facilitator who trained theatre-makers and actors like Yuki Ellias, Puja Sarup, Sheena Khalid, Gerish Khemani, Kallirroi Tziafeta and Tushar Pandey!

APPLY NOW: https://forms.gle/7a6yChnD1UPBBMKHA

WORKSHOP TAKEAWAYS:
Rediscover imaginative capacity within the constraints of lockdown
Write for performance by building a relationship with your environment
Deepen your performance capabilities with Lecoq and Viewpoints training
Create new performance material individually and with other performer-writers

ABOUT THE FACILITATOR: AMY RUSSELL
Amy Russell is a senior teacher in the pedagogy of Jacques Copeau -Suzanne Bing and Jacques Lecoq. She is also an award-winning playwright. She was a pedagogic student of M. Lecoq in 1997-98 and created the Naropa MFA in Actor Created Physical Theatre based on this pedagogy. She was Pedagogic Co-Founder of the London International School of Performing Arts (LISPA) in 2003, and lead teacher at this school in London and Berlin until 2017.

Amy is also a qualified and accredited Gestalt psychotherapist, a facilitator of group process for devising ensembles and an academic researcher. She is currently the Founder and Pedagogic Director of Embodied Poetics, a school for intensive training In Devised Physical Theatre.

Contextualizing Continued Training in Performance-making

“We turn to the arts when we are joyful; we turn to the arts when we grieve. And in times of uncertainty and despair, we turn to the arts again for sustaining our hopes. The arts enable us to forge solidarities, make sense of the present, and come together to imagine collective futures. This is especially true of now when the Coronavirus pandemic continues to disrupt and alter our lives.”

– India Foundation for the Arts

A lot of us are thinking about the future even as we do our best to take it one day at a time. Catastrophes of a global scale will do that to you. What does it mean to be a performing artist in these times? What does the theatre of the future look like? How can we imagine it together? 

These questions came later of course. What concerned DSM at the moment of this thought’s inception was, as co-founder and school head Jehan Manekshaw puts “how to survive the year financially while keeping our community of faculty, alumni, and followers (many of whom aspire to attend our courses) engaged during their time under lockdown.”

And as sometimes happens, in the attempt to solve a personal question, you arrive at a universal answer. And for DSM, this answer was the Global Faculty Programme. 

What is the Global Faculty Programme?

Screenshots from Vik Sivalingam’s ongoing workshop in the Global Faculty Programme

The Global Faculty Programme is a series of workshops for practising theatre-makers, actors, writers, directors and even filmmakers. The Faculty for these workshops comes from drama schools, companies and performance traditions across the world. Each month a Global facilitator will take a group of 15 participants on a deep-dive learning journey into a particular area of theatrical expertise. Designed for remote teaching, the course will comprise of six sessions via video-conferencing and 6-12 hours of coursework that participants will have to do individually or with each other. 

The journey is designed to build deeper awareness and provide new tools for further refining their performance and practice. Workshops in this programme will look not just at acting and performance-making, but also at design, lighting, technical aspects of theatre, and in today’s world, also explore the use of theatre tools and methods to bring stories in other mediums to life. 

This, we hope will to just open up the door for deepening skills and understanding, but give birth to cross-border collaborations that celebrate what brings us together instead of the <social> distance that keeps us apart. 

Why this Programme?

“…accessibility. Across nations, cultures, economic brackets and even individual disciplines. The fact that this pandemic has thrown us into a global melting pot (by virtue of commonality) is forcing us to all find a collective way out of it which is truly very.. unique. The fact we can have conversations with theatre makers in Chicago and Wales and London and they are facing almost exactly our challenges is in itself singular. Nothing else has forced us to hunker down together like this. And that’s what “global theatre” makes me think about.” 

As Amba – Suhasini K Jhala, LAMDA Alumnus and DSM Faculty member, identifies, we are truly at the threshold of true global connectivity. Space and time have become amorphous concepts, more so than they had consciously been in the past. In practical terms this means, learning together no longer needs to be restricted to a single physical space or even time-zone. It means that the intersection of digital pedagogy and live theatre training need to be examined and experimented with more rigour and focus because the stakes are higher and in some cases, urgent and irreversible. 

With Covid-19 situation, lockdowns and restrictions across the country, we are all waiting for live performances and public gatherings to restart. It’s important for us to recognize the anxiety born of this wait. But it is equally important to hold firm to the belief that the future of theatre still lies within our hands. That we can use these months of isolation and invest them in to global solidarity. That we can take values and tools from Peru, Singapore, London and New York and apply them to local practice, developing new work for this brave new world. 

Deshik Vansadia, faculty member and Stella Adler Studio alumnus says, “It comes down to truth.  If there is truth it works globally, if not then doesn’t even work for someone seated two feet away.” So as we look at theatre on the promenades and footpaths, in living rooms and empty stadiums, we need to learn from diverse traditions, diverse techniques that lead to a shared experience of this truth. 

Side-note: Do read these hopeful and articulate articles on the future of the arts:

1. exeunt MAGAZINE: What could socially distanced theatre look like? by Alice Saville
2. Medium: What should we expect from art in the next few years/decades? And what is art, anyway? by Carmen Salas

How is it being designed?

DSM’s strength has been it’s highly trained faculty which boasts of alumni from leading universities and actor training programmes. Moreover, over the years, DSM alumni and faculty have further made connections across the globe, through training and collaboration. 

The process of designing this programme is essentially leveraging this network. Which means the Global Faculty Programme could see facilitators from drama schools and companies in UK, New York, Germany, Singapore, Denmark, South Africa, Peru, Argentina, Columbia, Paraguay and Russia. 

What do we hope to achieve: Exposure to Global Theatre for Indian Theatremakers

Here is a small anecdote from DSM advisor and extended faculty member, playwright and director Ramu Ramanathan. 

“While in school I used to travel to Chandigarh or Amritsar for my vacations. My maternal grandfather was a professor and a linguist. He was proficient in six languages: Punjabi, English, Hindi, Haryanvi, Urdu, Sanskrit, etc. He knew his Ghalib and Tulsi and Shakespeare and Bulleh Shah by heart. At that time I realised that he not only could read the original version of the text but he could travel from one language to the other. Also, he could translate and interpret excerpts.

Also, I began to realise that while he was translating or lecturing, he was part of two traditions. And every theatrewallah should be so. Why? Because new worlds open up and new answers can be sought. In this day and age of homogenisation, I think this is important. More importantly, translations help you have access to so many languages: Mandarin, Italian, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, ancient Greek, ancient Sanskrit, Kikuyu, Khasi, Tulu, Norwegian, Russian. You begin to realise that there are innumerable outstanding works that have not been translated, and therefore innumerable writers and their voices to whom we don’t have access to. In a recent online session, the Argentine playwright Rafael Spregelburd spoke about Daniel Veronese, Lola Arias, Mariano Pensotti, Claudio Tolcachir, Santiago Loza, Javier Daulte, Alejandro Tantanian. It’s a matter of concern that theatrewallahs in India have not heard about our contemporaries nor their plays. For me this is the meaning of global.” 

What this little tale highlights is the somewhat distressing need for exposure to global practices in the Indian performing arts sector. If we are being honest, every sector – architecture, engineering, medicine, the humanities – actively seeks to learn about approaches and developments across the world. We hope that ultimately, this programme fulfils that same need for performing artists in India. That while our practices emerge from local experience, they are also tempered by global exposure. 

The Global Faculty Programme is a series of workshops for practising theatre-makers, actors, writers, directors and even filmmakers. The Faculty for these workshops comes from drama schools, companies and performance traditions across the world. Each month a Global facilitator will lead six sessions over video-conferencing for a group of about fifteen Indian participants seeking new perspectives, awareness and specific tools for further refining their performance and practice. Workshops will look not just at acting and performance-making, but also at design, lighting and technical aspects of theatre. This, we hope will not just open up the door for deepening skills and understanding, but give birth to cross-border collaborations that celebrate what brings us together instead of the <social> distance that keeps us apart. 

Here are the details of the first workshop in this series:

Shakespeare in Practice with Vik Sivalingam

Workshop Takeaways:

– Further your ability to access the language of Shakespeare

– Develop a deeper understanding of how to use rhythm and meter to inform your work

– Interrogate and reinforce methodology by working on material from chosen plays

– Explore and celebrate the adaptability of Shakespeare’s work to cultures across the world

– Explore the formation of an ensemble of players and create an online sharing of the work 

Facilitator: Vik Sivalingam

Royal Shakespeare Company/ Warwick University (Postgraduate Award in Teaching Shakespeare) |

Arts Council/ Birkbeck, University of London (MFA in Theatre Directing) 

Vik Sivalingam is a Theatre Director based in London. In the UK, Vik has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Almeida Theatre, the Old Vic Theatre, Royal Court, and Tricycle Theatre. Internationally, he has directed performances in New York, Brazil and the Netherlands. Vik is currently a Senior Tutor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts (LAMDA) and is an Industry Advisory Panel member for Taylor’s University School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Malaysia.

He has also directed in other UK and US Actor Training programmes including Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Syracuse University (for Shakespeare’s Globe), Brooklyn College, Temple University, Arts Educational Schools, East 15 Acting School and WacArts.

His directing credits include: 

The Ice Cream Boys (World Premiere, Jermyn Street Theatre)

There of Here (London Premiere, Park Theatre)

Home (London Premiere, The Last Refuge)

The Drunken City (London Premiere, Tabard Theatre) 

Half and Half- the Curry Musical (Welsh Millennium Centre, Cardiff)

The Bullet (Royal Shakespeare Company @ The Hampstead Theatre)

Invisible Man (Royal Shakespeare Company @ Park Avenue Armory, NY)

The Tempest (Rio Olympics)

Twelfth Night (Iris Theatre)

Radio Serenade (Medicine Show Theatre, NY) 

Blue/ Orange (The New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich)

To apply for this workshop, please fill in the following form.