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Workshops
Thursdays in November, on Zoom, 17:00-18:30
4th, 11th, 18th and 25th November
Register via Eventbrite for workshops 1, 2, 3, and 4
This is an invitation to participate in a series of workshops for Climate Change Theatre Action 2021, a global theatre festival that coincides with COP26.
Every other year, 50 professional playwrights, representing all inhabited continents as well as several cultures and Indigenous nations, are commissioned to write five-minute plays about an aspect of the climate crisis.
Every Thursday in November, an actor will begin a workshop with a performance of one of these plays. The rest of the workshop will be a kind of open rehearsal: we’ll talk about the play and how to perform it; try it differently; try it again. The workshops’ particular focus will be on the plays’ dramaturgies of encounter, asking about the nature of their offer to the audience, and what this might open and foreclose.
These workshops are part of my PhD research, which centres on how theatre can make us meet, and why that might matter. But they also go beyond my thesis, thinking through and practising some things I’ve needed and admired whilst I’ve been doing my PhD: techniques of attention and care; the ability simultaneously to differ and belong; the promise and possibilities of intellectual friendship; the desire to co-operate within (and in defiance of) competitive systems.
More broadly, then, the workshops will try to understand how to relate to others in ways that open towards something new. As such, they’re about finding questions, not answers; staging out of not knowing. They owe a lot to Rajni Shah’s Experiments in Listening, and will aim to emulate Shah’s characteristic moods and modes: thoughtful, gentle, and generous.
Places are limited, but the workshops are open to everyone. The Zoom sessions will have live transcription enabled, and anyone is free to leave any session at any time. Please write with any access needs, or if there’s anything I can do to make it easier for you to attend.
You can sign up for the workshops here:
04/11: David Finnigan, all of us were born in the crisis – https://bit.ly/3Ggik1c
11/11: Zoë Svendsen, Love Out of the Ruins – https://bit.ly/3Cdfms3
18/11: Chris Thorpe, Not Because We’re Good – https://bit.ly/2ZlmfIV
25/11: Hanna Cormick, Dream/Remember – https://bit.ly/3BeIQ7g
Feel free to drop me a message with any questions via the contact form.
Auditions
I need generous, thoughtful, flexible actors to help me develop a larger piece around some of the CCTA plays. More precisely, I need you for two days of R&D:
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Queen’s Building, Emmanuel College: 20th November 2021, 10:00 – 17:00
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J2, Cambridge Junction: 12th January 2022, 10:00 – 17:00
Before my PhD and now alongside it, I work(ed) as an opera singer and a coach. I studied at the RCM, and I’ve worked at the Royal Opera House, Opera North and Glyndebourne. The best thing I’ve done, though, is an opera called Silent City, which I worked on as a singer in 2019.
Silent City took the theatre seriously as a space of collective thought and mutual care. It was deeply concerned with who got to be there, how they came to meet each other and the work, and what we could achieve together. It held space for people; it was precise, tender, and wise. I was really proud of it. That’s the kind of work my research is on, and it’s the kind of work I’d like to make.
If that’s the kind of thing you’d be interested in, please get in touch via the contact form below. I’ll be holding auditions on Sunday the 14th of November, between 10 and 5: in the Queen’s Building, Emmanuel College, and via Zoom.