ICP Curriculum

ICP’s one-year certificate program is a rigorous laboratory and incubator for new performance intended for artists who are both practical and visionary, experimental and pragmatic. Participants are engaged with faculty on a daily basis with questions relevant to contemporary performance. Each lab is predicated upon an experimental approach to learning.

The purpose of this training and research is threefold:

• To cultivate new artists rooted in a strong foundation of history and theory in a contemporary context

• To create an environment in which the participating artists can begin to define an individual aesthetic

• To feed collaborators capable of communicating radical thought in space, time and body.

All ICP faculty are professional, working artists and educators. The faculty act as co-creators in the learning environment and each member of the faculty is pursuing their own creative research within the framework of the laboratory classroom. We believe this helps to sustain a culture of innovation and creativity while inspiring new modes of making, teaching and learning about performance.

Schedule

Fall Term will establish common vocabularies and integrated practice for the generation and execution of performance, including Viewpoints, Suzuki, Clown, Alexander Technique, Devising, and more. In Spring Term participants will become a producing company under faculty mentorship. They will develop, rehearse and fully produce a festival of new performance with no walls.

Examples of ICP trainings:

CLOWN

The clown has an open heart. The clown exists only in the present. The clown does not learn from mistakes. The clown’s spirit is unbending and undaunted. The clown relishes all experience. The clown is motivated by intense instinctive needs and desires. The clown is extreme in choice of tactics. The performers awareness of self, physically and emotionally, determines the individual clown.

Utilizing a personal physical vocabulary participants will develop a distinct clown character, exposing their personal psychological presentation to the world through the world of the clown. Participants will develop short clown bits in small groups and individually.

Viewpoints/Suzuki

ICP training foregrounds regular, rigorous practice of these ensemble-based techniques. Our training combines several intensive training periods with regular weekly practice throughout the year. The ICP progression moves from a strong grounding in the basics of both techniques, through a dialogue between the techniques, towards an integration of the techniques into the process of building original performance material.

The Suzuki Method is a rigorous physical and vocal discipline for performers, created by renowned theater artist Tadashi Suzuki and his company. The method is designed to regain the perceptive abilities and powers of the body/voice instrument. The psycho-physical training strives to restore the wholeness of the body as a tool for theatrical expression. Suzuki practice strengthens focus and commitment to being in the present moment.

The Viewpoints is a performance language that arose from postmodern, improvisational dance. Choreographer/philosopher Mary Overlie first articulated 6 Viewpoints as a formal vocabulary to think and talk about making work in time and space. Anne Bogart and the SITI Co adapted and clarified Overlies’ ideas to serve the actor. PETE and ICP faculty continue to investigate the vocabulary and add to the improvisational forms set forth by these artists. Viewpoints practice allows an ensemble to make bold theatrical work spontaneously and intuitively. It heightens awareness, develops specificity and allows for a freedom and flexibility of response.

MAPS OF SPACE

Participants will gain a historical understanding and context of the movement/dance theater from 1950’s to 1970’s as the foundation for the Viewpoints work and apply the concepts to the creation of original work.

Introduction to Maps of Space (Corridors, Grid, Four Quadrants) and improvisational movement skills of composing on-the-spot. Introduction to the Red Square Practice and compositional awareness. Participants will learn and embody Beckett’s Quad. Students will create original scores and compose theatrical “still lifes”, “portraits” and “landscapes” using movement, text, sound and object. Methods of inquiry include movement improvisation and composition, contemplations on creative process, designing scores for ensemble, composing on-the-spot, reading, reflection papers, seminar discussion and practitioner lab reports.

FREEDOM TO CHANGE

This class will introduce students to The Alexander Technique. Alexander is a reeducation in non doing. As a pupil, you will learn how to free yourself up for more ease, efficiency, and honesty while performing and living. You will learn about your stereotyped habits that prevent you from your best self, laying a foundation of good use for all of your creative work and life

Students will learn and practice the Alexander Technique. Students will apply the Alexander Technique principles to scenes and choreography and physical work. Being able to observe their own use and functioning during the heightened states, the student will be able to understand more about their own stereotyped, habitual reactions and determine whether they either serve or hinder the vocal and physical communication of truth.

Voice Lab

Building on Kristin Linklater’s work on the science of the self in relationship to the voice, participants will research new practices for opening up susceptibility to imagery, imaginary given circumstance, and text. This class is intended to co-create a supportive environment in which students give themselves permission to be curious about their voice.  Students will be encouraged to expand and to deepen their concept of what their Voice might mean to them at any given time.  Students will be invited to develop their awareness of and to examine their relationship to their voice and to explore ways in which they can nurture and nourish that relationship.

Devising

Devising is creating an original performance collaboratively. Utilizing all of the elements of the theatre to create narrative. Participants will experiment with the storytelling potential of text, design, and performance to craft short pieces.

Participants will iterate, distill, and develop work that considers structure, form, and content. Our focus will be on creating performances with cohesive internal logic, integrated use of theatrical elements, and bold aesthetic. Using vocabulary from clown, viewpoints, Suzuki, and other trainings, this course presents clear tools for building larger performance structures (compositions, propositions, throughlines, sequencing, layering, etc), offers models for feedback and ensemble-building, and presents an iterative creation process of making/naming applicable to a wide range of aesthetics.

Producing New Work

The ICP cohort will learn a practical, collaborative model of producing original performance based on PETE’s own administrative model. Members of the cohort will be paired with professional faculty mentors in producing, budgeting, marketing, technical direction, grant and proposal writing, and together the cohort will produce their own festival of new work.

Community Engaged Performance and Emergent Creativity

This workshop connects ICP’s somatic performance trainings with community engaged performance by asking how the emergent qualities of each can inform and affect the other. Beginning with a survey of contemporary applied theatre practitioners, the workshop asks participants to bridge the gap between emergence as experienced in a movement improvisation and the kind of community engagement they seek in creating work that addresses today’s landscape. The workshop culminates in a series of proposals for performances that engage communities in new ways. 

Directing Devised Performance

This intensive series addresses the specific problem of the role of a director in an ensemble-based devising process. Based on PETE’s own research in creative emergence, the workshop offers practical tools for cultivating ensemble agency, principles for fostering creative collaboration, and a roadmap for facilitating the creation of new work.

Questions? Contact Jacob Coleman at jacob@petensemble.org