Discover new creative pathways in this open-ended exploration of devised theater-making.

With an emphasis on experimentation, improvisation, and collaboration, students will generate new work—or rebuild previous work—based on prompts designed to push their creative boundaries. Inspired by Half Straddle, Elevator Repair Service, the Wooster Group, Jacques Lecoq, and Tony Montanaro, these prompts encourage students to use the entire campus of Celebration Barn as a stage and to draw on a wide range of source material, from the mundane to the profound. Rather than work toward a preconceived finished product, students will develop new strategies to help them face down or embrace the chaos of generating something intended for an audience.

Led by three adventurous theater artists with decades of devising experience, this workshop is a free-range foray into theatrical form and content. Davis Robinson (artistic director of Beau Jest Moving Theater), Mike Iveson (Broadway’s What the Constitution Means to Me), and Tina Satter (Broadway’s Is This a Room and HBO’s Reality) have been making original work in venues around the world and across media. They enjoy playing theatrically with the body, space, text, and time.

No prior experience is necessary. Come ready to create, collaborate, and get on your feet.

ABOUT DAVIS ROBINSON

Davis Robinson is founder and artistic director of Beau Jest Moving Theater, a Boston-based company with whom he has worked for over thirty years as an actor and director. Beau Jest has appeared at Lincoln Center, the Piccolo Spoleto Festival, and numerous theaters around the country. Their stage adaptation of Krazy Kat won the Elliot Norton Award, and their commissions from the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival led to three TW world premieres. In Maine, he frequently directs at the Theater at Monmouth and for Bowdoin College, where he is a professor of theater. He has directed Shakespeare, Chekov, opera, new works, and original projects, and has appeared in numerous films, television series, and commercials, including HBO’s Julia and Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers. Past workshops taught at Celebration Barn include Comedy for Actors, Improvisation, and the Devising Intensive. Davis trained with Jacques Lecoq in Paris and with Tony Montanaro and Keith Johnstone at Celebration Barn. He is the author of A Practical Guide to Ensemble Devising and The Physical Comedy Handbook.

ABOUT MIKE IVESON

Mike Iveson has appeared in dozens of productions in New York City and beyond. Broadway: What the Constitution Means to Me. With the award-winning company Elevator Repair Service: Gatz, Measure for Measure, Arguendo, The Sound and the Fury, Fondly, Collette Richland, Everyone’s Fine with Virginia Woolf, and The Select/The Sun Also Rises. Other theater includes the recent revival of David Hare’s Plenty (The Public); the Obie-winning A Beautiful Day…Great Lakes (New Georges), The World My Mama Raised (Clubbed Thumb), Crime or Emergency (PS 122), and How to Get into Buildings (New Georges). He is also a longtime collaborator with dance/performance artists Sarah Michelson and DANCENOISE; and he teaches at the Wooster Group Summer Institute for New York City public high school students every summer. Film: West Side Story; Television: Orange Is the New Black, Tulsa King.

ABOUT TINA SATTER

Tina Satter is an American filmmaker, playwright, and director based in New York City. She has been described by Ben Brantley in the New York Times as “a genre-and-gender-bending, visually exacting stage artist who has developed an ardent following among downtown aesthetes with a taste for acidic eye candy and erotic enigmas.” Her work often deals with subjects of gender, sexual identity, adolescence, and sports. She is the founder and artistic director of the theater company Half Straddle, which formed in 2008 and received an Obie Award in 2013. Satter has created ten shows with Half Straddle, and the company’s shows and videos have toured throughout the United States, as well as in Europe, Australia, and Asia. In the fall of 2019, she made her Off Broadway debut as a conceiver and director of Is This a Room at the Vineyard Theatre. The play moved to Broadway in 2021. Satter directed the film Reality, starring Sydney Sweeney, a cinematic adaptation of Is This a Room, for HBO. She won a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award in 2016 and a Doris Duke Artist Impact Award in 2014. She received a Pew Fellowship in 2019 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020. A collection of three of her plays, Seagull (Thinking of You), with Away Uniform and Family, was published in 2014.