Self-Generated Theater Lab

Join Obie award winning actor, playwright and solo performer Nilaja Sun for Solo Performance. Actors will learn a variety of playwriting techniques to help craft their own unique stand out solo pieces as well as learn physical, vocal and facial skills used in conveying a captivating one person show. Solo performers will then devise and perform their own solo masterpieces in class, inspired by their lives and the people who have become characters in them. Throughout the course, Sun will also guide actors in the business of solo performance and theatre making.

Led by renowned performance artist and mime Bill Bowers, this course serves to strengthen and relax the actor’s body, expand the actor’s movement vocabulary and open up their physical imagination, while introducing multiple approaches to creating new physically based theater work.

The alternative to conventional theatrical creation is Devising, creating theater without a pre-written play. We will explore the sources of inspiration, their transformation into performance sequences, working collaboratively in a non-narrative driven pursuit and the spirit of ensemble derived work.

What does innovation look like for the modern artist? How does the world that we live in today shape our creative impulses? How can theatre makers – actors, writers, directors, designers, producers, etc. – thrive at the intersection of limitless creativity and ethical sensibility?

In this interactive course, we will explore in real time while discoursing on the future of American theatre.

This course invites students to engage with the layered complexities of creating original performance outside traditional theater spaces. Through collaborative research, group explorations, and hands-on exercises, students will learn how to develop work in response to five interrelated layers that shape site-specific work: the physical and architectural features of a space (its shape, scale, texture, and sound); its utilitarian function and daily use; its historical legacies; its socio-political structures and implications; and its relationship to the site’s community.

Students will create short etudes or installations in public locations, transforming space into a living partner in storytelling—and rethinking where performance happens, what it reveals, and who it is for.

The Artistic Life Skills (Arts Justice Field Work Workshop) class creates an opportunity for established actors to practice the craft of acting in a non-traditional theater environment with first time actors.  Together we will explore how the spirit of ensemble, improvisation and storytelling can foster creativity and self-efficacy.  In this class, we foster a safe and healing space where authentic stories can be generated.

Artists who know how to use the business side of theater to their advantage are artists with an advantage. They can produce their work. We will address the difference between commercial and not-for-profit work, budgets, contracts, how to raise money and the fundamentals of the business of theater, with the goal that artists can emerge from the class prepared to self-produce.