Mabou Mines: From Idea to Execution
Lee Breuer/Maude Mitchell (USA)

Legendary experimental theatre company Mabou Mines’ founder Lee Breuer and Maude Mitchell lead participants through the company’s process of creation used in their iconic productions. Participants develop projects under Lee and Maude’s mentorship. Lee Breuer is the founding artistic director of Mabou Mines He one of this century’s most innovative and honored stage directors, as well as an author, lyricist, film maker, and teacher. Maude Mitchell, Mabou Mines Associate Artist, is an actor, dramaturge and teacher. She graduated from Oberlin College and attended The Neighborhood Playhouse – studying with the great acting teacher and theoretician, Sanford Meisner.

Lee Breuer is the founding artistic director of Mabou Mines He one of this centuries most innovative stage directors, as well as an author, lyricist, film maker, and teacher. Lee has directed thirteen OBIE Award winning performances, and has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Chevalier Des Artes et Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture, a MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ Fellowship, and Tony and Pulitzer Nominations He is in high demand as a director, teacher and educator, both in America and internationally. He has held positions at Yale University School of Drama, Stanford University, University of California, and Harvard University.

Maude Mitchell (Mabou Mines Associate Artist) is an actor, dramaturge and teacher. She graduated from Oberlin College and attended The Neighborhood Playhouse – studying with the great acting teacher and theoretician, Sanford Meisner. She has lent a Meisner oriented approach to workshops conducted with Lee in America, Europe and Asia and was a recipient of a US – Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission to be the first western acting teacher at the Far Eastern Acting Academy in Vladivostok. Maude is also an accomplished dramaturge, Un tramway nommé désir (for The Comédie-Française), Mabou Mines DollHouse, and The Laramie Project. Maude is best known for playing Nora in, and co-adapting Mabou Mines DollHouse with Lee Breuer. Maude performed Nora to critical acclaim in thirty cities on five continents, and  for her performance she was awarded a Village Voice OBIE, Drama League Nomination, Backstage West Garland and an Elliot Norton award.

For further information about Lee and Maude’s work, please visit www.maboumines.org.

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Challenging the Idea of What Puppets Can Do
Basil Twist (USA)

As Basil Twist creates iconic, visionary puppetry worlds with a remarkable range of style and scope, he has furthered contemporary artistry and the technical craft of puppetry.   Learn to explore shape, color, and movement, creating objects and learning to manipulate them to create your own form of theatrical expression.
Basil Twist is a designer, director, performer and puppeteer and the sole American to graduate from the École Supérieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionnette in France. On Broadway he created and staged the puppetry in The Addams Family, for which he won a Drama Desk Award. He was recently honored with a 2015 MacArthur Fellowship. He guides The Dream Music Puppetry Program at HERE.

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Scripting Play instead of Playing the ScriptSanjoy Ganguly (India)

The actors will be scripting play. The games and exercise in the workshop will act as social metaphors. Through games the actors will relate to their realities and will relate to themselves.  Thus  actors will find oppression, all of us will try to understand various dimensions of the oppressor and Oppressed  characters. After the scenes are scripted, the forum play will be structured. The workshop will also undertake a theoretical journey to visit & revisit Boal.

Sanjoy Ganguly began working in the theatre in rural Bengal in the early 1980s. His encounter with Augusto Boal, and his own passionate commitment to the creation of a more just and equal society, led him to found Jana Sanskriti, an independent organization committed to the use of theatre to empower the communities it serves. With more than thirty active theatre groups, Jana Sanskriti is now the largest organization of its kind in India.

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Theatre as Bridge Nube Sandoval/Bernardo Rey (Colombia)

The main objective of this workshop is to offer necessary instruments to work in spaces of social vulnerability, while creating processes of intercultural integration and of psychosocial rehabilitation, amid a theatrical practice directed to empower the resilience capacity of individuals. The combination between civil and ritual elements its what makes this method unique.

Nube Sandoval & Bernardo Rey are the winners of the 2016 Ellen Stewart International Award, Sandoval and Rey
directed the Theatrical Laboratory of psycho-social rehabilitation with refugee victims of torture in Rome and continue to work in Colombia in social contexts of high vulnerability. Their methodology, Theater as Bridge, is based on the rescue, stimulation and enhancement of artistic skills of participants.