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 ALEX TATARSKY

A “hilarious, finely tuned absurdist” (Theatre Jones), Alex Tatarsky (they/them) makes performances in the uncomfortable zone between comedy, dance-theater, performance art and delusional streetside rant, often breaking the fourth wall and embracing humor to reveal vulnerability and humanity. Sometimes there are songs. Their live performances actively play with perceptions of narrative language and strive to be highly responsive to venue and audience. Their original solo performance pieces Americana Psychobabble, Untitled Freakout, Buttplug Gnome, Dirt Trip and Sad Boys in Harpy Land have been presented across New York City at La MaMa, MoMA PS1, the Kitchen, the Glove, the Brick, Abrons Arts Center, Gibney Dance and Playwrights Horizons. Most recently, their improvisational project MATERIAL was presented as part of the Whitney Biennial. As a curatorial fellow at the Poetry Project, Tatarsky organized a series on the poetics of rot. They are honored to have been Garden Gnome in Residence at numerous public parks, including Glen Foerd and the South Philly Meadows. Along with collaborator Ming Lin, Tatarsky is one half of the roving poetic research unit Shanzhai Lyric and its fictional office offshoot the Canal Street Research Association. Personal interests include bootlegs, hellscapes and compost.