Practice Lab w/ Tanya Marquardt leading GROTOWSKI BASICS: River Work
Feb 8-9, 10:15-1:15pm
The Railpath Arts Center
Registration for this event has passed
about the session ↓
This workshop will be a laboratory style class concentrating on the training of Polish theatre maker and director Jerzi Grotowski (1933-99) and master Grotowski teacher Linda Putnam.
In this class, we are going to study a major component of Grotowski work called ‘Rivers’. Rivers are a series of somatic forms through which an artists’ impulses can be expressed as physical imagery. In a River, the body becomes a conduit for an image, a gesture, or sound - moving in, around, out of, or off of the body to become an imaginary entity that can be interacted with in space. These self-generated images invite us to deepen our investigation of self through full engagement with our senses, our particular artistic discipline, and our continuous notion of form.
Rivers are exciting, concentrated and challenging forms of exploration monitored through set work principles. In this workshop, students will be introduced to exploratory Rivers as well as formal Rivers, aiding the artist in discovering sources for further investigation. We will also explore ways to apply the work to creation, ensemble development, choreography, writing, and performance. Participants will engage in a range of physical activities from the explosive to the pedestrian, and will speak, sing, move and share solo improvisatory work within the group.
Bring water, a notebook, a pen and studio clothes.
about the artist ↓
Tanya Marquardt is a writer and performer. Their work is intimate—memoirs, Tedtalk/séances, private dances, ‘texting plays’, MP3 meditations, epistolary performances written to dream lovers—a fierce mucking about with vulnerability to get at life as a former runaway, third generation Magyar settler and genderqueer. Their book Stray: Memoir of a Runaway was a 2018 Best Queer & History Bio pic in The Advocate; a punk-musical version commissioned by Theatre Conspiracy toured nationally; Nocturne (an incomplete and inaccurate account of the love affair between George Sand and Frederic Chopin) was produced at Manhattan’s Dixon Place, Transmission, based on Sophocles’ Orestia was published in the Canadian Theatre Review, and Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep, Tanya’s play about being a sleep talker, was the subject of an NPR Invisibila. Their performances have been presented at PuSh, VIDF, Dancing on the Edge, rEvolver, Summerworks, foldA, The Tank, Brooklyn Museum, BAX, and The Collapsable Hole. They have worked with JoAnne Akalaitis, Jerome Bel, Ballez, Jess Barbagallo, Mallory Catlett, Fay Nass, the only animal, radix, and the Leaky Heaven Circus. They live and work on the unceded, ancestral and occupied traditional lands of the xwməθkwəy̓əm, Sə̓lílwətaʔ, and Skwxwú7mesh Nations and in Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenni-Lenape People, and Canarsie and Munsee Nations. IG: @Tanya-Marquardt // tanyamarquardt.com