In this workshop, participants will create new work for the American stage and/or internet in collaboration with the facilitators and other students. The workshop is based on the theater-generating process of Fake Friends, a theater and media company known for our live-streamed and queer comedies. Following in multimedia performance traditions, from the Wooster Group to the Ridiculous Theatrical Company to the Real Housewives, the company mashes up different performance modalities and technologies to unveil frictions, comedies, paradoxes, hypocrisies, and possibilities–– reality television confessionals, classical dramatic texts, ASMR, lip sync videos, makeup tutorials, and digital music production. Make It Work challenges participants to excavate their own experiences with contemporary life to generate original performances or plays.

The week-long workshop will immerses participants in a rigorous artistic and physical daily practice of ensemble-generated and solo-driven work. The ensemble will respond to a canonical play, which Michael and Patrick will assign prior to their arrival (past texts include Hedda Gabler and Vieux Carré). We will guide the ensemble in our process of grappling with, screaming at, dragging (and ultimately learning from) the historic work. Participants also enter the week with new ideas for individually -created theater projects. In a laboratory setting, Michael and Patrick will guide each artist in performance critiques and real-time workshopping to excavate and, potentially, radically reframe their approach to their material. Underpinning much of the work will be a practice of self-scripting, writing, and improvising from a place of autobiography.

As a group, instructors and participants will confront questions of dramaturgy, acting, directing, and playwriting: How do contemporary technologies like social media, live-stream video, theatrical projections, and digital sound impact how we create contemporary theater? What modes of performance emerge from interacting with these technologies, and how can they be used to create new dramaturgies and structures? How do artists represent “the self” in an age when avatars, aliases, finstas, and deep fakes rule the online world?

We seek artists who have:

A new idea for a play, video, livestream, or performance
A history with and passion for theater making as a writer, actor, director, dramaturg, or designer
A curiosity about how to expand, refine, shake up, and complicate their work
A sense of danger

Through the week, each artist will receive:

Three to five group work sessions
Two solo work sessions for the ensemble
A private one-on-one meeting with the facilitators
A short presentation of one element of their new piece on the final day

The goal of the workshop is to create a laboratory in which participants receive and share tools to make work that feels personal and unique to their contemporary experience of living in our mediated era. Thus, we will tailor the workshop to the specific bodies and identities that come into the space. By the end of the workshop, students will share either solo pieces or collaborative pieces, which we respond to and suggest how they can develop further––with the dream and hope that they will.

Past participants have gone on to present or further develop their works generated in the workshop at the Exponential Festival, Frigid Festival, the Civilians, the Brick, Prelude Festival, Dixon Place, and more.