JERK | OPEN STUDIO

WEDNESDAY 8th DECEMBER | 3 - 4.30pm
Maroochy Sailing Club, Chambers Island
Free Event
Register Below

Curious about the process behind creating contemporary interdisciplinary performance?

Sunshine Coast performing artist Ruby Donohoe is hosting an Open Studio as part of the creative development of her new work JERK in collaboration with dance artist Jenni Large and sound artist Chucho Bruno. The Open Studio will be an insight into devising processes, interdisciplinary collaboration, and how this project collides together dance, sound, design, participatory practices, and verbatim text.

ABOUT THE WORK
JERK is an irreverent free-fall based on Ruby's experience of living with epilepsy. Shapeshifting between the autobiographical body and the abstracted body, JERK inhabits a performative space between the experiential and the named, the chasm between the body and the body explained, and all that happens between cornflakes for breakfast and when the lights go out (and nobody is home). JERK explores what it means to have an out-of- body experience for a species tethered to the notion of body as self. These real-life anecdotes become passageways to capture the defining experience of epilepsy: the body moved by another force distinct from the self. The work pursues the personal body as political, immutable, and essential to the possibility of transcending the physical in a reclamation of the body.

REGISTER HERE

Photo by Ruby Donohoe x Ignacio Sarraf

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Ruby Donohoe | www.rubydonohoe.com | IG: @rubybridgetdonohoe
Jenni Large | www.jennilarge.com | IG: @jenlarge
Chucho Bruno | www.bigotesmusica.com | @chuchobruno

This creative development of JERK is supported by Sunshine Coast Council and Arts Queensland through RADF Project Funding as well as Access Arts Queensland.

Lost + Found

Hosted by The Old Lock-Up x IN | artist run initiative

Photo by Jorge Serra
Featuring Ash Djokic x Ruby Donohoe

Through intuitive, irreverent play throw some words at the wall and carve out new vocabularies with writer and interdisciplinary performance-maker Ruby Donohoe.

This workshop is for poets, performance makers, lyricists, creative copywriters, and all people looking to free-up their writing process.

Colliding poetics, somatic embodiment, found text, and personal story practices, this workshop is about finding words in unlikely places- within internal terrains, in the world around us, and, at times, in the lost + found.

Register interest below

Training

Ruby graduated with distinction from a Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in Drama and minoring in Scenography (QUT, 2014), Zen Zen Zo’s Performance Internship (2014), and Playlab Theatre’s Incubator Program (2018).  She was one of sixteen performers from all over the world accepted into Anne Bogart + SITI Company’s 2016/17 Conservatory (NYC) and was awarded a scholarship from the company to attend.

Ruby has taught embodied practice at QUT to acting, music, and dance students as a tutor (2018 - 2020), Expressions Dance Company, Open Practice (Backbone Arts), Technicolour Theatre, Kelvin Grove State School, and run independent classes including Embodied Practice for Directors (Playlab Theatre) + Mary Overlie’s Viewpoints (Backbone Arts).

Her training background includes: Butoh, Andante Method, Aerial Dance, Choreographic Series (Alexandra Beller), Clowning, Contact Improvisation, Contemporary (Dancenorth 2019 Internship), Creative Minds Workshop (Prying EyE), Feldenkrais, Gaga Dance, Movement + Meaning (Leisel Zink), Playwriting, Thomas E.S Kelly Masterclass, Sculpting In Time (Jon Skulberg), Improvisation (Andrew Morris), Stage Combat, Stanislavski Method, Suzuki Method, and Viewpoints. 

Her performance work has been featured in Emergency Index Vol. 8 (Ugly Duckling Presse, NYC, 2019) and Emergency Index Vol. 10 (Ugly Duckling Presse, NYC, 2021).

Ruby is an interdisciplinary artist with a body-based practice and background in contemporary performance. Ruby works with text, choreography, installation, and participatory practices to create work for theatre, gallery, and digital spaces. Find out more at: www.rubydonohoe.com

Embodied Practice For Directors

This 2-day workshop is for directors and performance-makers who are interested in exploring embodied processes. It will focus on how to work with actors using physical processes for directors to apply to scene-work, shaping monologues, blocking and composition, physical dramaturgies, character, emotion, and using breath as physical impulse.

The exercises and processes covered in the workshop are designed for directors and performance-makers to utilise so that they can encourage actors to:

• Access a tangible, practical framework for developing presence and spontaneity
• Expand their physical vocabulary and expressive range through play
• Develop a highly attuned capacity for improvisation
• Enhance responsiveness and body-listening for solo work, ensemble, and scene work
• Generate richer, more nuanced material when devising
• Unique approaches and provocations for creating stage blocking and choreography
• Reimagine the experience of “audience” through an embodied lens

This material is applicable to a range of genres- text-based work, devised performance, and immersive performance- and is an opportunity to critically reflect and share processes with fellow directors and performance-makers dedicated to rigorous practice.

Want to book this workshop? Any questions or curiosities? Reach out.

Photo by Warwick Gow

Viewpoints Training

Photo by Warwick Gow

Registration Details Below

Based on Mary Overlie’s The Six Viewpoints, this 2-day workshop explores six kinetic materials that make up live performance. Through a process of deconstruction and experimentation, artists develop a deep physical understanding and relationship to:

| Space | Shape | Time | Emotion | Movement | Story |

An increased sensitivity to these phenomenon strengthens a performer’s connection to the present moment and equips them with compositional tools to apply to improvisation, devising, or staging. For directors of contemporary performance, an embodied understanding of these materials enriches the dialogue between the performer, the work, and themselves.

The Viewpoints is an improvisational technique widely embraced in physical theatre training. Originally emerging from the post-modern dance world, The Viewpoints draw on visual arts terminology as much as it does live performance.

Qualities cultivated by the training:
• Access a tangible, practical framework for developing presence and spontaneity as a performer
• Expand physical vocabulary and expressive range
• Develop a highly attuned capacity for improvisation
• Enhance responsiveness and body-listening for solo work, ensemble, and scene work.
• Generate richer, more nuanced material when devising
• Experiment with a scenographic approach to the body
• Unique approaches and provocations for creating stage blocking and choreography
• Wrestle with a post-modern and anarchic approach to creating performance dramaturgies
• A paradigm and framework to reimagine the experience of “audience” through an embodied lens
• Develop an ongoing embodied practice to guide a sustainable artistic career that nourishes the artistic impulse.

Ruby has trained in The Viewpoints for over ten years. She was one of sixteen performers from all over the world accepted into Anne Bogart + SITI Company’s 2016/17 Conservatory (NYC) and was awarded a scholarship from the company to attend. In 2017, she also had the privilege of attending an intensive with Mary Overlie in New York. In 2010, Ruby began training with Zen Zen Zo in Australia and later went on to be accepted into their competitive 6-month Performance Maker Internship in 2014.

Ruby’s teaching credits include: Creating Body tutor at QUT for theatre, dance, and music students (2018 + 2019), Expressions Dance, Backbone Arts, and Embodied Practice for Directors at Playlab (2020).

Ruby is an interdisciplinary artist with a body-based practice and background in contemporary performance. Ruby works with text, choreography, installation, and participatory practices to create work for theatre, gallery, and digital spaces. Find out more at: www.rubydonohoe.com

Photo by Warwick Gow

When
Tuesday 15th June, 2021
9am - 5pm

Wednesday 16th June, 2021
9am - 2.30pm

Where
Backbone Arts
Riverside Studio
38 Lytton Rd, East Brisbane

*Venue is wheelchair accessible

Tickets
Regular Price: $180
Support Others: $220 (If you can afford, this allows some others to have discounted tickets)
Reduced: $150 (limited number)
*Fill out the registration form below and ticket payment details will be emailed directly

Interdisciplinary Practice and The Body

ABOUT
This research lab is for all artists across all art forms and all bodies.

A series of embodied explorations deconstructing space, time, shape, movement, emotion, and logic as kinetic materials. Through both critical and creative reflection, these body findings are used to provoke and locate new conceptual ideation, methodological approaches, and techniques for creation.

What does it mean to create from the body ‘as is’?
What does exploring sensorial phenomenon open up within our practice?

In attempts to dissolve hierarchies between these six materials, these sessions are designed for artists to discover new creative processes. And through these processes reveal new possibilities for the thinking behind our work, how we talk about it, and the artistic palettes available to us.

A practice that, hopefully, leads to more questions than it answers.

This workshop is driven by questions that have emerged from Mary Overlie’s life work of the viewpoints.

*Whilst working body-first, participants are free to bring in whatever tools they need to do to their work ie. camera, instruments, paint...etc.

ABOUT RUBY

Ruby Donohoe (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work offers defiant acts of sensitisation and is rooted in the politics of encounter. With a background in contemporary performance and a body-based practice, Ruby works with text, choreography, sculpture, installation, and participatory practices to create work for theatre, gallery, and digital spaces.

She graduated with distinction from a Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in Drama and minoring in Scenography (QUT, 2014), Zen Zen Zo’s Performance Internship (2014), the biennial 2016/17 SITI Company Acting Conservatory (NYC), and Playlab Theatre’s Incubator Program (2018).  She has taught embodied practice at QUT to acting, music, and dance students as a tutor (2018 - 2020), Expressions Dance, Open Practice (Backbone Arts), Technicolour Theatre, Kelvin Grove State School, and run independent classes including Embodied Practice for Directors (Playlab Theatre) + Mary Overlie’s Viewpoints (Backbone Arts). 

Ruby is currently an artist-in-residence on Chambers Island as part of the Sunshine Coast Council + Creative Spaces’ 3-mth Crows Nest Residency. Special thanks to Maroochy Sailing Club for making the space available.