7 – 8 June 2014 | 11 – 17 h | Mime Centrum Berlin
Action Theater Workshop with Ruth Zaporah
Advancing the practice:The faeries and the engineer
In our lives and on stage, most of us are squeezed between longing for a poetic life (enter the faeries) and the bland requirements of survival (enter the engineer). The Action Theater improvisation performance practice integrates this duality thereby enhancing and enlivening life no matter it’s context. The practice offers strong invitations to the faeries to enliven our imaginal journey, our perceptions and responses. At the same time the practice encourages and sometimes tricks the engineer toward expansive skillfullness; movement, voice, speech, solo, relationship, ensemble, Hand in hand the faeries and the engineer collaborate taking the improviser on a splendid journey of embodied raw honest pristine surprising content. As most practices, Action Theater demands to be entered over and over again, in order to expose, examine, enhance and lubricate the patterned system that we call “us.”
This workshop is open to Action Theater practitioners and others with advance skills in related fields.
Ruth Zaporahis a New Mexico based performance artist, director and teacher. Considered a pioneer in her field, she is internationally known for her innovative work in the form of physical theater improvisation she founded, called Action Theater. Her passion is the body — as an expression of the natural world, as a breath of the larger ecological system and as a portal to the imaginal world. All of her trainings and performances explore and reflect this as the baseline from which all action springs. Ruth’s practices bring the focus inward, expanding awareness and stimulating imagination. The capacity for feeling is strengthened as are the roots and tools of expression and performance. Using movement, vocalization and narrative, participants experience fresh views of themselves, who they are, what they perceive and how they respond. The conceptual mind that insists on defining content learns to share with more spontaneous embodied and imaginative resources. The lights turn on, exposing splendid moments.
Zaporah spends much of her time on tour, performing and leading trainings in the U.S. Canada, Europe, Australia, Israel, and Asia. In 1994 she performed in theaters and refugee camps in Serbia and Croatia. In the spring 2000, she added Kosovo and Sarajevo to that itinerary. Zaporah is a two time recipient of National Endowment Choreography Fellowships. In 1994 she was honored with a Sustained Achievement award by the San Francisco Bay Area Dance Association and 2006 was selected to be a U.S. Cultural Envoy..
Ruth’s articles on improvisation have been regularly published in Contact Quarterly, a magazine for new dance forms. Her book, ACTION THEATER: THE IMPROVISATION OF PRESENCE, published by North Atlantic Books, is in its fifth printing. Several films about her and her work have recently been released. For further information about Ruth and her work go to www.actiontheater.com