February 22-29 -- NYC
Join us in learning from and experimenting with Jeff Wirth during this intensive week on interactive performance techniques. Sign up here!
We will continue to develop our creative working vocabulary of “interactive” performance by playing with brand-new material. This style is important to us, because it expands audience members' creative potential within themselves. Upon our return to our home-base, we look forward to presenting to Minnesotan audiences more acutely designed performances within the “interactive” style.
Guiding the week is Jeff Wirth, one of our greatest mentors, our dear friend, and one of the leading professional in “interactive performance" with knowledge built over his life-long career experimenting with performance techniques to profoundly engage audiences.
More About Jeff:
He is the Chief Creative Officer of Wirth Creative and the Artistic Director of Interactive PlayLab in New York City, where he develops improvised interactive story experiences for entertainment, simulation, and research. He has consulted for such top-tier clients as Cirque du Soleil, Blue Man Group, and Disney Imagineering and has directed over 100 improvisational shows. For 9 years, Wirth served as a faculty member at the University of Central Florida and has led master classes at universities and festivals across the United States. interactiveplaylab.com
The tools for creation are invaluable and Live Action Set is available to share our knowledge with students and performing artists of all levels to help create performances through residencies that take a practical approach to collaboration. We draw upon our diverse backgrounds to offer workshops in ensemble play creation, contact improvisation, clown, treteaux and physical characterization.
Communication is essential to collaboration. Participants learn to build teams and work together as an ensemble as well as learn useful tools for creating performance material while engaging and challenging their skills as artists. We actively research and implement methods of collaboration in our own work because we believe that together we are able to make work we couldn't make alone.
Past residencies have occurred at:
THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, ST. BEN'S/ST. JOHN'S UNIVERSITY, THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH GEORGIA, CYPRESS LAKE HIGH SCHOOL
Content of P.E. workshops are determined by the teaching artists and can include a wide variety of styles and methods. Themes proposed by participants and drawn from Live Action Set works-in-progress may also inform content. A portion of P.E. sessions is sometimes devoted to creating material to be shown at informal presentations each month. All material created is "open source," no one has sole ownership of an artistic idea or creation proposed in the training sessions. Everything is available for others to expand, manipulate, or use in another medium or venue, for the true sharing of knowledge places no limitations on creativity.
Past teaching artists have included:
VANESSA VOSKUIL, JIM LICHTSCHEIDL, RYAN UNDERBAKKE, VLADAMIR ROVINSKY, KIMBERLY RICHARDSON, DARIO TANGELSON, LUVERNE SEIFERT, TYLER OLSEN, NOAH BREMER, THOMAS PRATTKI (UK), TOM CORNFORD (UK), RAYE BIRK, CANDACE BARRETT BIRK, AND GERALD MCDERMOTT (CA), JEFF WIRTH (NYC), STEVE WASSON AND CORINNE SOUM (PARIS/WI)