INVITATION: PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITY

Tools for devising and playbuilding toward a group performance 

Dates: 28 June and 1 July- 10am-3pm (lunch included)

The Australian Academy of Dramatic Art (AADA) is offering limited places in a Professional Development Workshop & Forum (see over for details) for High School Drama Teachers. Exploring the nuts and bolts of devising and playbuilding, the workshop provides the creative teacher with tools applicable to all aspects of the Drama Syllabus with particular relevance to the HSC Group Performance. The workshop is led by the Head of AADA, Andrew Davidson, a NIDA graduate, theatre director, and respected arts educator. It reveals a physical and conceptual vocabulary for setting students’ creativity in motion and empowering them to make an exciting piece of live theatre.

The content is based on Viewpoints, an approach to theatre making developed by the New York theatre director, Anne Bogart. Bogart’s tools for generating movement material and developing the voice for performance provide new and surprising ways to discover devised material and assemble it in a comprehensive way. Senior students from AADA’s tertiary acting course will work with Andrew to demonstrate the principles of Viewpoints. They will then develop a sample thematic idea to illustrate how a teacher can apply these tools to group exercises and, ultimately, liberate the students to make their own work.

A Forum for discussion will follow. Topics for discussion will be relevant to the process of creating the Group Performance such as: 

• Choosing and Working in a Group
• Developing and Refining the Performance
• Timelines and Logbooks

Don’t miss out on this exciting opportunity to expand your own skills in order to empower your students to make fresh and dynamic devised work!