SYMPOSIUM SESSION TWO – July 27 – August 10, 2016

Theater for the 21st Century
Marianne Weems (USA)

Media affects every aspect of our experience. How can the stage be updated to reflect our 21st century lives?  We will investigate bringing narratives and new forms together to create an innovative theatrical language.   We expand our toolkits as we work through exercises and sketches for integrating media (film acting vs. stage acting, composing with technology, merging media with meaning, and more.)

Marianne Weems is a theater and opera director and co-founder of the award winning New York-based performance and media ensemble The Builders  Association.  Since 1994, Weems and the ensemble have created a significant  body of work at the forefront of combining media and performance.  She has created original large-scale productions and toured internationally to over 80 venues; their last four productions premièred at The Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Shifting Concepts from Brain to Bone
Yoshiko Chuma (Japan)

Chuma will guide a workshop in which participants will transform conceptual ideas into physical movement. The investigation process of transformation from intellectual concepts to physical movements becomes an exercise for both the brain and the body. There will also be several lectures by Chuma about past and present work, and action exercises with props.

For more than three decades now, Yoshiko Chuma has been building unique structures in the liminal area between her native Japanese culture and her adopted American one. Using trained and pedestrian movers, virtuoso instrumentalists (whose playing she often conducts), film, video, and sculptural forms by collaborating artists, she develops unusual time-based art works that blend the live and the recorded, the flat and the three-dimensional, people and things.

The

Dimension of Image in the Theater Art Work
Elia K. Schneider (Venezuela)

The workshop focuses in the dimension of the Image as the essence to explore a universal language in the theatre art work. Participants are expected to read Kafka’s stories and research the work of expresionistic and surrealist painters, creating scenes and characters, and translate them to a background where image is the essence of the dramaturgy.

Elia K. Schneider is known for hauntingly visual productions that transcend language with strong imagery and a dreamlike fresco of movement and design. In Judgement on a Gray Beach, themes of exile and totalitarianism are explored by a condemned man–he knows not for what– on a beach populated with ten antiheroes who fully comply with absurd laws and obey nonsensical orders. Will he escape or return for punishment?

Chinese Opera Technique for Contemporary Performance
Tian Mansha (China)

Tian Mansha’s performance methodology training workshop for directors leads participants, from understanding their own bodies, to exploring the use of breath, thought, emotion, energy, and transmittance for working with actors. She will introduce the three essential energies (“jing,” “qi,” “shen”) of xiqu (“Chinese opera”) performance; how emotion is generated; and, when emotion is generated, aside from physiological changes within the body, what external expressions are employed.

Tian Mansha is a prominent performing artist of Sichuan Opera and a National 1st Rank Actress and director. She is a forerunner in the contemporary Sichuan Opera reform, and one of the most important people in contemporary Chinese Opera Theatre, who is engaged in acting, directing and teaching at the same time. She is one of the few artist and directors in China, who tries to find modern forms and expressions of the XiQu and to introduce modern forms of teaching.