Vivi Tellas
A Workshop: Documentary Theatre with your own Family
This workshop is aimed at directors, artists and others who are interested in, and want to explore, non-representational theatre and working with the non-performers involved. Tellas will share her experience and unique vision, guiding participants toward new ways of discovering and involving theatrical elements from life and history.
The workshop will focus on the “great theatrical themes” in family history: deception, appearance, secrets, betrayal, love, and death. Is one’s own family the first theatre we go to? Is it the first theatre we perform in? Tellas will teach how to focus on the real person, how to begin the careful work of exploring canonical family stories, photographic archives, and contradictions. Participants will learn how to work with their own family members, using their domestic or professional knowledge or skills to create pieces for performance.
To this end, and in a bold departure from conventional theatre workshop processes, participants will actually invite and involve their own family members. Documentary Theatre is known in the UK mostly as biography or verbatim-style translation of the real to the represented. Tellas's practice has its roots in another kind of 'live documentary'; one which draws on lessons learnt from decades of screen-based documentary as well as a long tradition of non-representational, live work in the visual arts, yet without losing enthusiasm for a theatrical, celebrational and accessible experience.
The workshop will take place at Shunt (London Bridge) in March:
Thursday evening, 20 March - a 'welcome' meeting with Vivi including an overview of her work, and indications about how to gather family 'material / evidence' over the Easter weekend, where possible.
Tuesday 25th: 2-7pm
Wednesday 26th: 2-7pm
Thursday 27th: 2-7pm
Friday 28th: Preperation for showing, 2-7pm
6 - 9pm: Informal 'showing' in the Arena of the SHUNT LOUNGE.
Each day will involve studio time with Vivi Tellas and Vivi will be available most days for one-to-one chat / advice outside the workshop hours, at the Shunt Lounge or in a nearby cafe.
Vivi Tellas is an inspirational director, performer and teacher. She was born in Buenos Aires and having worked there as an artist, performer, director and tutor for the last 35 years is now considered one of the most influential theatre practitioners in South America. She is the artistic director of the Teatro Sarmiento, the experimental wing of Argentina's National Theatre. She continues to forge new paths in the theatre and has a passion for sharing her discoveries. The Other People have been in Buenos Aires with Tellas for the last four months and are delighted to offer some of this experience to artists in the UK.
FREE for Shunt Lounge members, £50 otherwise.
If you are interested, please email gbrockis@googlemail.com
Links>
www.proyectoarchivos.wordpress.com - full CV for Vivi Tellas and video excerpts from Projecto Archivos
www.archivotellas.com.ar - Vivi Tellas website
www.archivotellas.com.ar/kid.html - interview in English
www.theotherpeople.org - Gemma Brockis (Shunt), Ant Hampton (Rotozaza), Greg McLaren
Supported by the British Council, the National Portrait Gallery
BIG CHANGE - IT WILL NOW BE HELD AT SHUNT, IN LONDON, AS PART OF THE SHUNT LOUNGE. IT IS FREE TO MEMBERS, AND ONLY £50 FOR NON-MEMBERS
The Other People are delighted to announce a five day workshop with celebrated Argentinian avant-guard theatre director Vivi Tellas:
"I have been interested in exploring what I would call “the thresholds of theatricality”. When and where does fiction begin? To trace the elements which constitute theatre (those things without which it would not be recognisable as theatre: repetition, presence, the situation, the other’s gaze, the ritual, the text) in lives, experiences, situations, or disciplines which are not part of the theatre. This interest has formal consequences: the theatre is no longer an art of representation: it is a practice of the presentation of cases."