This workshop lead by Dr. Anna Furse (founder of Athletes of the Heart) will work with body memory to locate how past experiences are both contained in and triggered by the senses. Emphatically not therapeutic, it is, rather, an approach to using memory for creative practice. Participants should bring an object related to a memory they wish to work with, notepad and pens. Barefoot and practice clothing essential.

Anna will present – When We Were Birds as part of DOUBLE BILL #1 on Thursday 24 April

COMPANY INFO

Dr. Anna Furse is Head of Department of Theatre and Performance, and leads the MA in Performance Makingat Goldsmiths – an international laboratory programme in performer-driven theatre/dance/live art making. She convenes Space-Body-Spectator and supervises undergraduate Dissertations and practice-led PhD students. She is the curator of the Performance Research Forum PRF (Dis-Play) – currently in its 21st programme – for which she received a Peake Teaching Award in 2005, is a Principal Academic Staff member of Goldsmiths Digital Studios, Department of Computing and co-director, with medical historian Dr Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, of the new interdisciplinary Centre of the Body.
Anna is one of the handful of the first generation of women directors in the UK, uniquely combining feminist concerns with Laboratory theatre research from the late 1970’s, working in theatre/dance professionally since 1978 in experimental, community/applied, site specific, repertory and international contexts.

Recent productions include a Wellcome Trust People Award for GLASS BODY – REFLECTING ON BECOMING TRANSPARENT (2006), a radio debut with the BBC MY GLASS BODY with Sweet Talk Productions (The Wire, Radio 3 2007) and her co-production DON JUAN.KDO?/DON JUAN.WHO? with Mladinsko Theatre, Ljubljana 2007/8. She was invited to join the Arts Council funded Choreographic Lab at Northampton University with a research project GRAPHIC BODY – that examines and notates the body as a scenographic tool 2005 – 2007 (soon online on Goldsmiths webpages). In 2007 she was recipient of an ArtsAdmin Roaming Bursary with which she has been traveling to India and Poland to research for next project DUST with Soho Theatre. Her play THE PEACH CHILD was part of the National Theatre’s NEW CONNECTIONS programme 2008, staged regionally and at the Cottesloe Theatre and published in NT NEW CONNECTIONS, Faber 2008.

Previous Artistic Directorships include the pioneering women’s performance company Bloodgroup whose “haunting, daring…electric and brilliant” (CITY LIMITS) work included the sell-out piece on the sex industry DIRT (ICA 1983) and Freefall ­ a company she co-founded with actresses Juliet Stevenson and Paola Dionisotti to produce Eric Overmyer’s ON THE VERGE (Birmingham Rep/Sadlers Wells/Baylis 1989). From 1990 she was Artistic Director of the prominent new writing company Paines Plough with whom over five years she created innovative projects and collaborations. These included an Anglo-French co-production of George Orwell’s DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON with a cast of 9 and 100 extras in a disused abattoir in Burgundy, commissioned by The British Council, Paris, to celebrate Europe 1992. This was invited to the Tramway, Glasgow and to the Theatre de Gennevilliers in Paris in 1993. In France she also worked as director and consultant for the Comedie de Caen (Playtime 1992-4), led workshops in Paris and a laboratory for the Theatre de La Metaphore, Lille who staged her production of WAX in 1995.

She has directed shows for The Traverse, The Phoenix Leicester, The Theatre workshop, Edinburgh, Dance Umbrella and co-produced with repertory theatres in the UK including Plymouth Theatre Royal and Salisbury Playhouse. She has directed women-centered projects for companies as diverse as Graeae, Scarlet Theatre, Women’s Theatre Group (Sphinx), New Midlands Dance, Women’s Playhouse Trust, Magdalena and The Royal Shakespeare Company for whom she was movement director on the Women’s’ Project in 1987.

Anna’s early training was as a scholarship student at The Royal Ballet School, followed by academic study at Bristol University, The Sorbonne in Paris and apprenticeship studies wth Peter Brook (C.I.R.T, Paris 1971) and Grotowski’s Teatr Laboratorium (France and Wroclaw 1976/7). She was a new dance activist in the early 1980’s, as a founder member of Chisenhale Dance Space in London and on the editorial collective of New Dance Magazine.

Her teaching foregrounds the body in live performance making. Over 27 years she has developed her own physical training methodology, which synthesizes a range of theatre, dance and martial arts techniques.

Anna is currently Reader in Drama at Goldsmiths, University of London, Department of Drama where in addition to undergraduate teaching she runs the MA in Performance Making and curates the Performance Research Forum.

She is Guest Professor in the Program in Theater and Dance at Princeton University, USA and Guest Tutor at the Institute A.V.A. Academy of Visual Arts, Ljubljana.

Place: Fringe Lab, Dublin Fringe Festival, Sycamore Street, Temple Bar
Dates: April 25
Time: 10:00-12:00
Tickets: €15