|
home
Corey Fischer has been creating and performing theatre for nearly forty years. In 1978, he co-founded Traveling Jewish Theatre and still serves the company as writer, actor nd director.He has received numerous awards and fellowships including a Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays award for his play, See Under: Love. Fischer’s fiction and non-fiction has appeared in several anthologies and magazines Before the founding of TJT, he worked in film, television and theatre with, among others, Robert Altman and Joseph Chaikin. Corey works with professional artists, dedicated amateurs and beginners – privately and in groups – as a creative guide. He serves as mentor, guide and coach for the Bay Area improvisational ensemble, Tumbleheart.
|
Friday, August 1, 7 - 9 PM and Theatre-Making Intensive
making theatre
where
a
laboratory-style workshop
WIth my colleagues in Traveling Jewish Theatre, I've spent thirty years creating original works of theatre that weave together personal (autobiographical) and collective (ancestral, social, political, historical) material. Looking for the points of connection between these realms allows us to explore with fresh eyes and ears, to discover surprising meanings in the stories we've lived and to break the isolation our society often imposes. In the workshop, participants will explore – in both solo and ensemble forms – ways of working with a variety of source materials: found texts (including poetry, prose fiction and non-fiction and personal writing) songs, storytelling, improvisation. We'll also work with non-verbal voice and movement -- an essential element in this approach to theatre-making. In pre-workshop telephone meetings with each participant, we'll determine individual goals. In some cases, participants may choose to focus on solo work, while others will work in teams. Given the time limits, we won't expect to complete the theatre-making process, but will have created early, still-raw elements of works that can continue to be developed after the workshop. The overarcing goal of the intensive is to discover how these tools can be used and how the personal and the collective persectives can provoke and enliven each other to form something larger and less predictable than work that arises from a one-dimensionsal approach. Much of the work will be active and embodied, but there will also be time to discuss and reflect. Enrollment limited. Admission by interview (via telephone).
Class Time: 16 hours. Fee: $250
Friday, August 1, 7 - 9 PM and
|
People unfamiliar with TJT often ask what style we work in -- comedy or serious? Do we do musicals? Yiddish theatre? I have to sidestep since there isn't a single "style" for us. Music, humor, ancestral material mix with mask and puppet work; the line between song and speech, movement and dance is permeable. We're not a "physical theatre" like our admired colleagues the Dell'Arte Company and yet our work is intensely physical. The point is that for us, style must come from the material, not be imposed upon it to serve a predetermined idea. Our work is informed by seventy years of American avanf-garde theatre and dance, by thousands of years of human expression and by the processes of collaborative, ensemble creation.
From its first piece, Coming from a Great Distance in 1978-79, a re-imagining of the Jewish storytelling tradition intersected by the struggle of modern American Jews to forge their own Jewish identity, to its recent, international collaboration on the Middle-East, Blood Relative, TJT has insisted on finding personal connections to ancestral, historical, political and spiritual material and to understand how individual lives relate to the "larger," collective spheres. |
