BACK FROM PERFORMANCE RESIDENCIES

I am just back from three weeks of performance workshop residencies at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA and the Savannah College of Art. Wow! What great work the two ensembles did as we made original full-evening performance pieces. Wild visions of gender and culture and family and body. Personal myth and meatphor. Oops! I mean METAPHOR!

I love getting to pull this original performance material out of the groups I work with. I walk in the room to begin the work. I walk into the room with a head stuffed with questions. How to begin this work? What can I hope to achieve? Who are these people? These actors and artists. These humans. How can I start to get their juices to flow? Their risk-taking nature to come forward? Their courage to let their hearts be more open? What nerve I have to ask them to look into the abyss. Teaching people to perform is asking them to enter a series of embodied experiences of light, body, feeling and breath.

Through my work, I try to share a variety of strategies to create performance from the tremendous energies that are present in our lives as we live them. I guess I really do believe the journeys through our lives offer us tremendous opportunities to know ourselves more truly and to create a culture of witness that is crucial to becoming a human being. I ask these groups to look under their big rocks and find the hot and wet places of their stories, and dreams and myths. I ask them to own their fierce living and bring that forward to be witnessed. If you want to read a particpant's view of this work check out this link
http://www.netspace.org/~icwp/ICWPnewsletterNov2004-Seeing.html