Starting Again!: A Perfect Wedding

Hello, everyone.

It's been over a year since we began this blog back in the spring semester of 2009. I'm teaching the same class again, but with a few important revisions; and because the course goals and materials are, for the most part, the same, I've decided to continue with the blog we used before. This way, it becomes an ongoing compendium of thoughts and information on the evolution of this community-engaged acting process.

Last year, we worked with the plays of Naomi Wallace.
This semester we're beginning again, but this time developing characters for a production in UofL's mainstage season, A Perfect Wedding (that link will take you to the script in its entirety). Students in the class will be choosing characters from this play on which to work this semester, and engaging with members of the local community as they develop those characters for performance.

This is, in part, an extension of the work we did on Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed: A Theatrical Documentary on the Topic of Marriage, which we devised starting in 2009 and performed in April of this year. Our interest in that project was in using theatre to start an ongoing dialogue on the topic of marriage, especially with the purpose of joining the national debate over marriage equality. This debate has entered the news again recently, since Proposition 8 was overturned by a federal judge in California, but marriages of gay and lesbian couples were put on hold by the Court of Appeals. The case is expected to go all the way to the Supreme Court. It seems useful to find ways of using theatre to explore this issue with local communities.

But also, Mee's play addresses a lot of important and engaging issues: cultural difference, love and relationships, death and funerals, beauty. And it does so in a sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking way. It's a comedy and plays on the conventions of that form, but is also poignant and even dark at times. It seems like it would be a fun way to introduce the public to this method that is intended to make the actor's process more democratic, engaged and responsible to community.

And also again, this is a class in which students will learn about the theory and practice of a number of different artists whose work they may not have other opportunities to study in a direct and practical way. We'll talk about how this work can provide them with tools for building their own processes outside of school.

So it's a lot of work we have ahead of us this semester, but I think it will be fun and productive work! Students are required to post on here over the course of the semester, so it will be updated on a regular basis. Please please help us as we take on this project: we would love to hear any thoughts on what we're doing ... just click on the envelope at the bottom of the post to leave a comment.

We're starting by learning about Viewpoints training, and how to use it to stage performance compositions. You can learn more about this technique by clicking on some of the links to the right.

More to come, very soon ...