Bodies/Spaces/Things: Theater Creation Lab

TDM 136TC Subject & Catalog Number

Description

A practical class for actors, directors, dancers, and designers, Bodies/Spaces/Things: Theater Creation Lab is a laboratory for performance creation and movement analysis with a scenographic lens. Inspired by Lecoq’s explorations of actors’ identification with materials, architecture, and space, this course engages in a “pedagogy of discovering the unpredictable.” Students invent and perform original dramatic material with an emphasis on the encounter between human actors and performing design. This interplay seeks to elicit expressions of the human condition: hope, transformation, transcendence, loss, futility, power, despair.

The dynamic tension expressed between animate and inanimate beings in theater is palpable in the work of many contemporary and historical artists, including: Robert Wilson, Robert LePage, Phillipe Genty, Basil Twist, James Thierrée, Oskar Schlemmer, Complicité, and Nederlands Dans Theater.  Students explore and research how such bold visual design concepts perform onstage through the hands of puppeteers and alongside physical actors and dancers.

Each week students are introduced to exercises from visionary teachers of visual and physical theater: Jacques Lecoq, Kari Margolis, Anne Bogart, Chris Bayes, Frantic Assembly. Through this training, concepts such as making time, the speed of fun, spatial storytelling, collective packets, the need to continue, pattern, choral movement, and the body’s lines of force inform the creation of original dramatic shorts. By improvising as a methodology for creation, students learn to synthesize their physical, intellectual, and intuitive bodymind in a state of performing. Draft performance pieces are considered in relationship to key concepts from the psychology of visual perception, puppet theater scholarship, clown studies, cinematic visual storytelling, the dramaturgy of objects, and insights from the above-mentioned physical and visual theater teachers and artists.

These experiments inform rehearsals for a key component of the course: independent performance creation in small group ensembles. This auto-cours aims to foster students’ ability to invent original dramatic content through movement and visual design in varied roles: as physical actor, director-writer, movement director, and designer. Student work is viewed weekly, discussed and thereafter refined as homework. The midterm is a group proposal for the final performance project utilizing theatrical staging, scenic items, props and puppets, sound, and light.

Course Notes

This course satisfies the “Practical" requirement for TDM concentrators and Secondary Field students.