Dramatic Function: Reading for Actors, Directors, and Designers

LED BY: Peter Hinton
LOCATION: THE THEATRE CENTRE
DATES: JULY 25-27 | 11am-6pm

This workshop looks at the working theatre artists’ investigation and reading of a text from interpretive, conceptual, and devised/auteur points of view.

We will explore theatre text as a musical score or road map toward performance. The principals of reading will be informed through INTERPRETATION: textual analysis, words, etymology and punctuation, CONCEPTUALIZATION; action, genre and meaning, and PERFORMANCE; related works, and disciplines and the intersection in devised creation. The workshop will use Ted Hughes translation of Seneca’s OEDIPUS for the National Theatre (1967) and Sylvia Plath’s radio play THREE WOMEN, broadcast by the BBC (1968) as the base texts for our investigation. Copies of these texts will be provided by the instructor and distributed the first day of the workshop.

The workshop will examine the connections/revisions/re-imagining of these texts from earlier sources and consider this work as a template for the theatre artists’ approach to dramatic text for contemporary production. The work is applicable to the actor and director and designer alike.