Wednesdays September 18, 25 & Friday September 27, 1300-1500
In this creative writing workshop, we will focus on the early part of creation, by disarming and preparing ourselves to discover stories from embodied lived experiences. Text, whether it is written, spoken, or silently planted as subtext, is a crucial and essential mode with which we understand the world. This workshop will invite participants to defamiliarise themselves with their definition of ‘story’ and ‘text’, drawing a wealth of inspiration from different poems, essays, letters and songs. Utilising theories by Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes and Alexander Chee, we will return to foundational semiotic questions of how humans communicate their experiences with words, and how shared meaning-making happens between the speaker and the reader. Each session will begin with a physical warmup and exploration, and eventually transition into free drawing and writing, journaling and prompted writing exercises. This workshop is for anyone with a desire to explore creative writing, especially those wanting to integrate it with a movement-based/performative practice.
Physical movement and exploration will be part of the class, but we encourage you to approach this according to your needs and in the comfort of your own home. We would advise wearing comfortable loose clothing for the class, and to be in a private space where you can move.
The EMBODY series seeks to provide a space for scholars and researchers to apply creative tools from the world of performance and voice training to explore our psycho-social lived experiences. In this dynamic workshop series, we will use embodied movement and voice practices to connect the dots between physical, cognitive, artistic and collaborative processes:
How can artistic spaces open discussions about the lived experiences of individuals and communities?
How can collaborative and self-reflexive theatre practices birth new non-hierarchical research processes? How can care and trauma-informed support be at play within pedagogical spaces?
How is art = research? How are the processes of embodied exploration and performance in constant dynamic between art-making, autoethnography and critical analysis?
These workshops are open to all, with no previous experience required, but will be particularly valuable for practice-based researchers, and anyone in the field of theatre, performance, music and comparative literature research.
About the Facilitators:
Elisabeth Gunawan a critically acclaimed and award-winning Chinese-Indonesian theatremaker and performer, and the founder of SAKSI BISOU, a global-majority-led artistic collective that seeks to decolonize, transgress, and empower. This is reflected in the aesthetics of their boundary-pushing work in theatre and performance art. She wrote and performed Unforgettable Girl, which had its world premiere at Edinburgh Fringe 2023 at The Pleasance as one of the winners of the Charlie Hartill Fund. The piece has received critical acclaim including 5-star reviews from The Stage, Theatre Weekly, and The Reviews Hub, and won multiple awards including the OFFFest award at VOILA! Festival, Best Performer in a Play in The Stage Debut Awards 2022, and Best Writing from Theatre Weekly’s Best of the Fest. In 2021, she was a recipient of Arts Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice fund to begin her ‘Myths, Stories and Worlds’ research (née ‘Mythical Storytelling’), which continues to be the backbone of her practice today. For the period of 2021-2022, she was a resident artist at the Grotowski Institute, where she continued this exploration. She has taught at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, LASALLE College of the Arts and Italia Conti.
Matej Matejka is a multi-award winning movement and theatre practitioner and movement therapist who specializes in opening up the creative potentials of the body, and this comes out in his teaching and directing. Most recently, he was movement director for Flabbergast Theatre's Macbeth (Assembly Roxy - Edinburgh Fringe) and co-director of Saksi Bisou's 'Prayers for a Hungry Ghost' (Barbican Centre) and 'Promised Land' (Bloomsbury Festival) UK. Born and raised in Czecho-Slovakia, curently living in Poland, he was an actor and movement co-trainer with Farm in the Cave studio in Prague from 2000-2005 and Teatr ZAR, Wroclaw, Poland from 2005-2018, where he performed in 'Dark Love Sonnets', 'SCLAVI: Song of an Emigrant', 'Anhelli: The Calling' and 'Caesarean Section: Essays on Suicide', winnning Herald Angel and Total Theatre awards in Edinburgh in 2006 and 2012. He is the founder and leader of Studio Matejka, a performance research studio and company under the auspices of the Grotowski Institute, in which he directed and created multiple theatre productions, short films and interactive performances among others 'Awkward Happiness or Everything I Don’t Remember About Meeting You', 'Charmolypi', site-specific projects including 'Angry Man: Variations in Defense of Anger' nominated for The Best OFF 2018/2019 in Poland. Matej directed seven short films, including 'Pearadise', which won the Best Foreign Film award at the Los Angeles International Underground Film Festival in 2013 and 'Conflict of Apathy' in NUDANCE Festival, Bratislava 2014.