Matilda Nomination

[BRISBANE, AU] Stephen Atkins and Zen Zen Zo co-artistic director Simon Woods share a nomination for a Matilda Award in the category of Best New Work. This is for the new interactive theatre piece “Sub Con Warrior 2.0″ which premiered in Brisabane, QLD in May 2008. The project was the result of many months of real-time and online collaboration between Atkins and Woods, culminating in a week-long creative development process in Dec 2007 before the piece went into rehearsal. The challenges of doing a promenade piece of interactive theatre, relying heavily on technology and integration of live and filmed segments rested on the shoulders of an extensive, talented group of artists. Sub Con Warrior 2.0 is currently slated for tour dates in Shanghai and Korea.

Preparing for Australia

I am within days of departure for the first leg of my journey to Brisbane to be an intern performer and director with Zen Zen Zo. To those who wish to follow along via this blog (sorry, can’t pack you in my suitcase—it’s full) I will be posting discussion of the books and some of the material we are covering in the master classes and workshops. To my students; this is sort of an early intro to the material we will be able to cover next year.

I have managed to find all my Christmas reading. If you want to get copies, I found them either on Amazon.ca or at Biz Books in Gastown, Vancouver. Follow these links (they’re not part of any affiliate program). We’ll be discussing the first four at length. I am including the rest as supplemental readings. They give some perspective on the primary texts.

• The Empty Space, by Peter Brook
• The Way of Acting, by Tadashi Suzuki
• Towards a Poor Theatre, by Jerzy Grotowski
• A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art in Theatre, by Anne Bogart
• The Art of Stillness: The Theatre Practice of Tadashi Suzuki, by Paul Allain
• At Work With Grotowski on Physical Action, by Thomas Richards
• The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition, by Anne Bogart and Tina Landau
• Performer Training: Developments Across Cultures, edited by Ian Watson

This list is almost impractically long, but here’s one more.

• The Paper Canoe by Eugenio Barba