Unrehearsed Futures – Conversations in Theatre Pedagogy

Key Objectives:

Initiate a global conversation on drama practice and pedagogy
Enable and nurture meaningful exchange between drama practitioners, teachers and students from various drama schools across various countries
Create a unified dialogue about global best practices and emerging trends in drama pedagogy and theatre training and practices.
Explore the idea and examples of the ‘future’ of theatre, its purpose, its manifestations, its role in individual life, and society.
Give traditional perspectives a global platform and promote cross-cultural syncretism
Document divergent and convergent thought and present them in an accessible format for wider use through an online journal and other forms of downloadable content
Build a connected community across the planet who will be a part of the ongoing conversation.
Be a space for new collaborations and initiatives to emerge.

The first series was initiated and moderated by the Drama School Mumbai, and set the stage for questions faced by drama schools and the teachers and students of theatre.

In October 2020, the Drama School Mumbai collaborated with Embodied Poetics, for a second series titled: Response-ability: Theatre Pedagogy in Changing Times.

Curated and moderated by Amy Russell, Founder & Director at Embodied Poetics, the conversations hoped to deepen the dialogue on themes and trends that have emerged in the past few months, with keynote speakers bringing in their diverse approaches to working in theatre and performance during the pandemic.

For the second series, taking off in April 2021, Embodied Poetics and the Drama School Mumbai are pleased to be joined by the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies.

Curators Mbongeni N Mtshali and Mwenya Kabwe will work with Amy Russell and Jehan Manekshaw, to bring other exciting contributors onboard to explore our ‘unrehearsed futures’.

In December 2022, Ben Samuels, an award-winning producer and writer, and artistic director of Limbik came on board as a curator for Unrehearsed Futures. We are pleased to share that he will continue curating for the fourth series as well, bringing on exciting and intuitive guests to explore the many possible futures.

The conversations with participants from across the globe, will continue to look at questions of performance, pedagogy, practice, critique, and investigate themes of intersectionality, hybridity, advocacy, and through those, find the opportunities that lie ahead for theatre’s transcendence to a new resilience and relevance.

SEASON 4 – There Will Be A Time…

“I’ve said it before—in contrast to those traditional stories that begin with ‘Once upon a time…’ Zapatista stories begin with ‘There will be a time…” – Subcomandante Galeano (formerly Marcos).

This season of Unrehearsed Futures is inspired by Galeano’s call to see the future as a vital space of action, in which the power to shape the present and thus create the future no longer remains concentrated in the hands of elites. As Galeano’s aphorism suggests, beginning the stories we tell about our lives, our ambitions and the world we want to be part of with “There will be a time…” calls on us to move away from our reflexive preoccupation with a past that remains unchanging and unchangeable, to insisting on a future that not only can but will be, in spite of that past. To begin a story with “There will be a time…” points us towards what late capitalist modernity and its systems of power would have remain unthinkable: that we have the capacity to determine and insist upon a different collective pathway for humanity and our planet.

This season, Unrehearsed Futures takes up this call to engage the future as an imaginative space of radical potential, where we not only name and negotiate the kinds of collective futures we desire based on our collective experience — what could be — to insisting on what will and must be as our point of departure, and from there, devising concrete strategies to manifest that future.

Curators: Season 4

Amy Russell

Amy Russell is Founder and Pedagogic Director of Embodied Poetics, which offers exploratory workshops and three-month summer intensives on the pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq, Jacques Copeau and Suzanne Bing in London, U.K., internationally and online. She is the Pedagogic Co-founder of the London International School of Performing Arts (L.I.S.P.A.) and founder and Chair of the Naropa University M.F.A. in Lecoq-based Actor Created Theatre. She has taught theatre creation internationally since 2003, at schools and conservatories, theatre companies and festivals. She is also an award-winning playwright and a qualified and accredited Gestalt psychotherapist and group facilitator. Her doctoral research at the University of Tasmania, Australia, is focused on theatre devising as a practice of social space.

Ben Samuels

Ben Samuels is an award-winning producer and writer. His genre-defying work extends from visual storytelling and music theatre to interactive fiction and immersive audio, and celebrates ensemble, collaboration, and internationalism. He received his BA in Postcolonial Studies from Brown University (USA), and received his MFA at the London International School of Performing Arts (LISPA), where he was supported by a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship for Theatre Arts.

As the Artistic Director of Limbik, he catalysed the company’s ground-breaking work at the intersection of immersive digital technology and live performance. This includes Fatherland (2019), which pioneered the use of real-time motion capture and immersive virtual reality technology in live theatre. Most recently, Limbik’s outdoor, site-sensitive work, Rebel Rabble, blended 3D spatial audio with live performance in the woods from a participatory, community cast.

In Limbik’s earlier output, he co-created and performed in the company’s first show, The Harbour (2010), which won the “Creative Award” at the Prague Fringe, and Ghost Town (2012), on the California Gold Rush and economic collapse. Ben directed Limbik’s next two projects, about NHS nurses who work on organ donation cases (The Messenger, 2014); and a dystopian future in which women from developing countries work as human garden ornaments (The Forecast, 2017, inspired by George Saunders’ short story, “The Semplica Girl Diaries”).

Throughout the pandemic, Ben focused on creating new work for immersive, spatial audio. His short story “The Garden,” a text-based story for smartphones and tablets accompanied by a 3D audio soundscape, was selected for a Nesta Alternarratives Bursary, and is currently on BBC Taster. The forthcoming “Voice Thief,” created with acclaimed Latinx writer and performer Gaël Le Cornec, turns the audience into the protagonist of an immersive audio play on WhatsApp.

Jehan Manekshaw

Since his Masters in Theatre Direction from the University of London, Jehan Manekshaw’s contributions to the Indian theatre sphere have been considerable. He founded and heads the Drama School Mumbai, driven to forging a new generation of theatre-makers, is director of Theatre Professionals to promote theatre-based learning through school education, and has built partnerships across theatre institutions to strengthen the training and upskilling of theatre professionals. His contribution has been acknowledged by the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the Indian government’s apex body for performing arts and culture, by conferring Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar (award). With a rich background in pedagogy, and practice, Jehan conceptualised Unrehearsed Futures, and co-curates it with peers for a global, holistic overview of the challenges facing the theatre industry.

Mbongeni N. Mtshali

Mbongeni N. Mtshali works across a range of performance disciplines, including dance and movement composition and performance, animation and puppetry, and site-specific performance installation among others. He earned a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, as well as the Standard Bank Silver Ovation Award and the Fleur du Cap Theatre Award for his achievements in directing and performance-making. Mtshali is primarily interested in black queer/femme performance in South Africa as well as Africa and its diaspora, turning towards queer genealogies of African decolonial world-making in the Caribbean, South Atlantic and Indian Ocean. These research interests frame his practical and theoretical enquiries – with Unrehearsed Futures, as another venture into understanding the broader landscape of global theatre practice.

Mwenya Kabwe

Mwenya B. Kabwe is a Zambian-born maker of theatre and performance, facilitator of creative processes, a performer, writer, arts educator and scholar with migrant tendencies. Her creative practice is focused on contemporary African theatre and performance, immersive and site specific performance work, live art, collaborative and interdisciplinary art making and re-imagining African futures. She has lectured and taught performance theory and practice in the Drama Departments at the University of Cape Town, Wits University and the Market Theatre Laboratory and is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of Cape Town.