The Volcano Conservatory
July 24-30 2017
Our annual offering of workshops provides access to alternative training in performance styles from around the world, taught by master teachers. The programs invite participation from all kinds of artists — directors, actors, dancers, singers — whether new professionals or seasoned practitioners, who are looking to expand their horizons and delve deep into new artistic territory.
The full 2017 Conservatory Schedule will be released soon!
until then... here's a sneak peek:
Making the Future Present: An Artistic Leadership Intensive for Culturally Diverse Artists.
Led by: Simeilia Hodge-Dallaway with Madani Younis
LOcation: The Theatre Centre
Dates: July 24-27
Simeilia Hodge-Dallaway (Founder and Managing Director of Artistic Directors of the Future) will be joined by Madani Younis (Artistic Director, Bush Theatre) to facilitate an exclusive four day course set to demystify the role of the artistic director in producing theatres.
During this course, participants will gain the unique opportunity to imagine themselves in the chair of the artistic director to examine their artistic and managerial vision with leading professionals, leaving them equipped to pursue their own pathways towards leadership.
To pre-register for this class, please email Michele at michele@volcano.ca
an awkward and maybe embarrassing conversation about difference: studies in radical transparency
led by: Sarah Garton Stanley & Marcus Youssef
Location: The Theatre CEntre
DAtes: July 29 & 30
National Arts Centre Associate Artistic Director Sarah Garton Stanley and Neworld Theatre Artistic Director Marcus will introduce the group to a creation/performance and dialogue model called “an awkward and maybe embarrassing conversation.” Using it, they will lead an investigation of radical openness or transparency: a determination to speak publicly, spontaneously, with both rigor and vulnerability, about our own failures in relationship to issues of power and privilege and identity. Sarah’s a self-described “uncertain lesbian”. Marcus is a self-described “faux-Arab”. They come to their multiple identities with as many questions and perceived contradictions as they do certainties.
Sarah and Marcus do this as both a methodology for unlocking authenticity in performance, and as a trust-building axis for participants engaging in public dialogues. Public conversationsand artmaking about questions of power, are often rigid, defensive, predictable and bound by ideological righteousness. Social Media is a perfect example of this kind of public conversation. At the same time, other public and performative encounters can be equally bound by a weird, false positivity that is averse to conflict. An awkward and maybe embarrassing conversation about difference models a space in which these two binaries are challenged, and in which conflict is permitted simply to exist, where the value of being right is actively questioned, and where failure’s fundamental importance to human existence is acknowledged. In this way, it seeks to encourage open, supported, and risk-taking art-practice and dialogue.
Quoting Sarah and Marcus: “This performative idea is built on our dream of being honest and our shared belief in the productive potential of uncertainty. Doing it, we have found ourselves to be truly caught, unsure and awkward and embarrassed – as all humans are when faced with complex questions no single person can resolve, our own complicity and the hypocrisy with which any one of us necessarily encounters fundamental questions of power and privilege.”
To pre-register for this class, please email Michele at michele@volcano.ca
For questions or more information, contact Michele Charlton at michele@volcano.ca or 416-538-4436.
Volcano Conservatory
July 31 – August 6, 2017
The Theatre Centre, 1115 Queen Street West