In October tutor Ian White is present at the Dutch Art Institute with Tanja Baudoin. During this first session of the project practice-theatre, we begin exploring ideas about the positions from which we speak, the relationship between speech and silence, reception and (critical) production and how such positions are literally defined by the occupation of different kinds of physical space – the theatrical auditorium and/or its antechambers. We aim to establish some co-ordinates by reading and discussing a fragment from Roland Barthes’ On Racine, as it relates to Aristotle’s Poetics and Augusto Boal’s description of Aristotle’s Coercive System of Tragedy in Theatre of the Oppressed, and by visits to the City hall in Arnhem. In the afternoon we will begin to develop a physical vocabulary derived from and aiming to enact and describe our experiences and thoughts.

In addition, on 28 October at 20:30 hrs the students of practice-theatre are attending Five Sisters at Frascati Theatre in Amsterdam, presented by If I Can’t Dance. This performance presents the story of five sisters, who busy themselves with the problems and pleasures of modern life on a Sunday afternoon. The California sun provokes their reactions, emotions and moods. French-born artist Guy de Cointet (1934-1983) was an influential member of the Los Angeles art scene from the 1960s onward.

practice-theatre
a project tutored by Ian White in collaboration with Emma Hedditch and Jimmy Robert, and curated by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution. Coordinated by Tanja Baudoin.

practice-theatre is a cumulative project that seeks to explore and question, through performance, the various aspects of what the place of theatre means to us and how we might want to use it in our work. Each month the project will expand and enact ideas around a different aspect of theatre – with what’s done one month mapping onto the next – to consider the positions from which we speak, how we act, and what, through different frames, speaking and action might be.

Read more about practice-theatre here