John Freeman, United Kingdom
John Freeman is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Head of Theatre and Associate Professor in Performance Studies at Falmouth University UK. He holds an Adjunct Associate Professor position at Curtin University Western Australia. He has written extensively on theatre, performance and creative education, with six books, nine chapters and approximately eighty articles published in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Portuguese. He was the founding editor of ‘Performance Practice’, the first UK journal to focus on practice-led research, and is currently regional editor for the New York-based contemporaryperformance.com
His latest book ‘Remaking Memory: Autoethnography, Memoir & the Ethics of Self’ was published in 2015, followed by the second edition of ‘New Performance/New Writing’ for Palgrave. His 2010 book Blood, Sweat & Theory: Research through practice in performance is used in universities and conservatoires worldwide.
Pace, Scale, Duration, Composition.
Devising processes benefit from a playful approach. As such, allowing time to experiment with ideas first, rather than being in a hurry to fix scenes and storylines encourages improvisation rather than discussion. This workshop focuses on creative processes and strategies for developing new devised, physical and visual theatre, and helps to instil confidence in making and discussing new theatre ideas. In devising, participants should be encouraged to explore all the elements of theatre including such things as physicality, movement, stillness, scale, sound, proxemics and pace .
This workshop opens up some tactics and techniques for making interactive theatre. Open to all theatre-makers: writers, performers, directors, designers, facilitators, and more the day will be led by John Freeman.
Participants will work through six modes of performance: imitation, indication, expression, metaphor, description and reality. Through these, ideas will emerge which are then used to create moments of repeatable performance. These will then be developed further by the workshop leader.
The workshop exercises can be used on their own or applied as a technique for approaching a story, theme or aesthetic stimulus that any members of the group might be working on.