Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Emphasizes compositional skills and the rigorous exploration of movement, text, and design. Co-Lab provides directors, performers, writers, sound artists, designers, filmmakers, and choreographers opportunities to devise, rehearse, and perform new public facing performances or events to audiences over the term. May repeat once for credit.

COURSE DETAILS:

*All students at the SCA are welcome and invited to take CO-LAB, please email the instructor for permission at erika_latta@sfu.ca

CO-LAB provides directors, performers, writers, designers, music and sound artists, filmmakers, and choreographers with opportunities to collaborate and explore methods of composing devised performance within an ensemble. CO-LAB is an experimental lab for workshopping, developing, and defining performance in front of a live audience, where both the maker and the audience are integral to the creation of the piece.

Drawing from this fall’s theme of MEMORY PAVILION, students will research, devise, rehearse, and perform a triptych of works—Record, Rewind + Replay, and Recall—to be presented to an invited audience on October 9th and 10th in Studio T, and November 6th and 7th in Studio T, with a final design-led installation on November 28th throughout the SCA building. Students will embark on an investigation into the theme of memory—spanning technology, performance, and reality—seeking to question and challenge the concept of authenticity in relation to both memory and live performance.

By exploring the theme of MEMORY PAVILION within performance contexts, we will delve into the complexities of memory, utilizing technology, emotion, tone, sound, visuals, text, and movement to investigate Record, Rewind + Replay, and Recall. The class will examine notions of authenticity and imagination, inviting the audience to engage with the intricate interplay—and the glitches—between recalling, reliving, or fabricating the gaps in memory.

Each work in the triptych will explore the act of recording, rewinding, replaying, and recalling memories through the lenses of text, movement, sound, and design. Inspired by our obsession with being remembered and our desire to understand our own stories and the world around us, we will gather ideas from our collective research and source material such as the Golden Record, Janet Cardiff’s Opera for a Small Room, the work of Ant Farm’s time capsules, the Memory of Mankind project by Michael Kunz, the writings of James Baldwin on memory, and the line from Macbeth: “To the last syllable of recorded time.” As a class, we will examine artists who center memory in their work, as well as those who incorporate film into performance to create tightly choreographed live cinema—using the pressure of the camera on the actor’s body as a close-up to the ephemeral, visceral nature of our shared human condition.

Students will be given parameters, a small budget, three to four weeks to rehearse, design and run technical rehearsals for their work-in-progress showings. During the rehearsal phase, students will present their work-in-progress in class to receive constructive feedback from their peers and the instructor to be incorporated in the final public presentations. 

This course encourages a landscape of exquisite pressure, lateral thinking, shared vocabulary, trial and error, and innovation, where ideas and concepts can be discussed and challenged in a constructive environment. CO-LAB creates a working laboratory where students can choose to be inspired to work with, extant plays, new playwrights, a novel, an overheard conversation, an article in the newspaper, collective written text and/or from personal writing and research. As a collective we will train together, discuss, question and discover through rigorous exploration the relationship between movement, text, architecture, sound, light, site and design. We will experiment and investigate how an audience experiences a given work and how we can translate each project’s concept from a rehearsal room into a live performance.

CO-LAB combines techniques in creating devised live performances, building ensembles and incorporates the vocabulary of composition, improvisation, the language of cinema, the exploration of emotion, desire, movement and working in concert or in contrast with music. 

CO-LAB will look at the process of writing as it relates to the development of the students' devised work in scoring, planning, research, project statements, methodologies, form, point of view, dialogue, characters, plot and editing. 

Students will have the opportunity to incorporate props, costumes, video, sound, sets or new media as tools to create new innovative live performances. Students are encouraged to reach out to collaborators beyond their area and outside the School of Contemporary Art in creating their three works, thereby opening a dialogue of exchange for possible future collaborations.  

Important Dates  /  Performance + Installation Dates /

*Please note all public performing performances require technical rehearsals outside of class time the week prior to the performance dates. Schedule for technical rehearsals TBA. 

• October 9TH and October 10TH  RECORD_  Studio T at 7:30pm Showtime 
• November 6th and November 7th REWIND + REPLAY_Studio T at 7:30pm Showtime 
• November 28th RECALL _TIME CAPSULE  INSTALLATIONS: Throughout the SCA Building from 6:30pm-8:30pm  

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Course Learning Outcomes /


• discuss, analyze, and apply the composition tools: their use and application as both a performer training tool and to create composition for the theater.
• utilize a greater theatrical presence through listening skills and heightened body awareness.
• attain kinesthetic awareness, group listening, strength, flexibility and freeing the physical instrument. 
• ability to perform, direct, design and create a physical performance on stage or site in space and time.
• perform various warm-up exercises, stretches, and ensemble training and be able to lead rehearsals and ensembles.
• experience in working with performers, building a character and physical performance through the use of the training, improvisations, text analysis and research.
• attain a greater understanding of ensemble work by creating, constructing and writing original material within an ensemble.
• attain a greater understanding of source material, translating themes, articles, on-line research, novels and texts to create time-based work.
• ability to create performance scores, create project proposals and to write clearly about the work generated in class.  
• the ability to conduct rehearsals, delegate and communicate with actors, designers and co-collaborators.
• experience gained in writing original material, creating devised work, articulating in writing shared feedback on ensemble collaborations both individual and collective efforts, collaboration time-management and telling a story or sharing an event through light, sound, text, music, new technology and movement.
• a greater knowledge of creating, navigating and encouraging a positive working environment made of discipline, rigor and a shared vocabulary of performance.
• understand the value, discipline and focus it takes to create new innovative work.

Grading

Materials

RECOMMENDED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: