Workshops

Designed in collaboration with your HEI and delivered by Artistic Associate Robert Clark (accompanied by young performer Sorrel Barnes when requested), these workshops include short screenings of VDT’s production work and focus on students exploring the key stylistic features of VDT’s work from the seven modules below to compliment your current provision:

– Working with non-professionals
– Bringing yourself to the creative process
– Use of Text, Testimony and Spoken Word
– Partnering – Technique and Use
– Use of Ensemble
– Physical Setting (Staging Work)
– Translating Live Work into Film Installation

MODULE 1: WORKING WITH NON-PROFESSIONALS

VDT is expert in making professional productions that integrate young people and vulnerable adults. VDT’s ‘people centred’ productions offer a public platform to those whose stories are rarely otherwise heard. This module explores:

– What non-professional performers bring to a creative process (discussion)
– Identifying themes and target groups and working with lived experience
– Making issue based / thematically driven work (discussion and practical)
– Adapting creative processes to integrate differing abilities and ages (discussion and practical)
– Play as a creative tool (practical)
– Inclusive Practice, appropriate work environments and managing creative expectations
– Safeguarding in practice (discussion into practical)

Example of content:

The group will be lead through a series of games that seamlessly segue into choreographic tasks with performative outcomes. After a discussion about this method (its uses and potential to facilitate non-professionals into working with movement, within a choreographic structure), students will be given a choreographic brief and begin working in groups to identify and create games and tasks to explore and produce material for non-professionals. These games will then be tested and explored with the group, leading into further discussion about refining the creative process and interrogating the application of thinking into real world situations.

MODULE 2: BRINGING YOURSELF TO A COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE

VDT’s methodology requires performers to combine physical and performative skills with a degree of personal emotional investment. Setting personal boundaries and understanding that putting personal material into the public realm comes with long term consequences for performers and organisational and personal responsibility. What skills are needed to manage this complexity? How to produce meaningful content without oversharing or triggering others? This module explores:

– Working from a theme or source to develop creative tasks (discussion into practical)
– Developing material from ideas into scenes (practical)
– Editing and staging creative content (practical)
– Disrupting the flow and working with challenging content – yours and other people’s (discussion into practical)
– Keeping yourself safe (discussion)
– Inclusive working practices (discussion into practical)

Example of content:

Participants will watch a video of Artistic Director Charlotte Vincent outlining the collaborative and devising methodology used by VDT to develop work. This will be followed by a facilitated discussion with the workshop leader focusing on the performer’s perspective. Participants will then either recreate an existing piece of company repertoire as a group or be guided through a choreographic task that replicates the way the company works to create new material.

The material produced will be discussed, looking specifically at how the process relates to the core themes of the work from which it taken, and how it aims to communicate with an audience the key ideas of that work. Finally, participants will be lead through a facsimile of the creative, feedback, directorial process that would then take place to make that material ready to be performed on a public stage.

MODULE 3: USE OF TEXT, TESTIMONY AND SPOKEN WORD

Roles in VDT’s work are often ambiguous and fluid, not representing a fixed character but rather designed to create a choreographic image, share meaning through movement or provoke thought. Performers follow a personal emotional arc through a full-length work or carry a particular scene within it, adding to a larger dramatic whole. Vincent’s work balances the abstract with the literal, dance, movement and gesture with text and spoken word. Words offer something more concrete, readable, thematic and specific. VDT’s work is not verbatim theatre – ‘framing’ rather than ‘fictionalising’ the lived experience. As a performer Robert Clark often functions as a humorous narrator, compere or spokesperson for Vincent’s work, using direct address to break the fourth wall to appeal directly to the audience. This module explores:

– ‘Framing’ the lived experience (discussion into practical)
– Translation of testimony / captured conversation into performance (discussion into practical)
– Direct address – comment from within / breaking the fourth wall (practical)
– Humour in spoken performance (practical)
– Discord and affirmation, the word and the body (practical)
– Words as a creative score (practical)

Example of content

After a discussion around safe practice in the studio, and with guidance from the workshop leader, participants will write a short piece of autobiographical text/ text based on lived experience and then develop the text for verbal presentation (not performance), shared in small groups and critically discussed. Each participant will then pick a text from the group to work with (mimicking using testimonies not your own lived experience) and discuss with the workshop leader options and methods used by VDT’s core cast to respond to this source material. Themes will include possible methods of response to text; explicit translation and developing visual and physical metaphor; ‘staging’ ideas; addressing motivation and choices around performance of source material. Participants will also be encouraged to think about thematic, political and personal motivations for the staging and choreographic choices they are making and be encouraged to share and discuss this with the group.

‘It got me to get in touch with an emotional side I have not explored in movement before.’ Barbican Plymouth Masterclass

MODULE 4: PARTNERING

Partnering is a key element of all VDT’s work to date. The duet form has the potential to demand equality or highlight inequalities between adult and child, old and young, between differently abled bodies. This module will explore:

– Looking at consent and safe working practices (discussion into practical)
– Weight taking and sharing, into assisted jumps and lifts (practical)
– Working with momentum (practical)
– Understanding the flow of initiative involved in partnering (practical)
– Partnering as a metaphor for human connection and trust or the breaking thereof (practical)
– Staged fighting (practical)

Example of content

Having established safe and clear guidelines around consent and touch, the group will be led through a series of improvisational tasks, leading and following a partner through contact and weight bearing work. This exploration will increase in complexity, with care paid to the experience and ability of the group. The skills and awareness developed in this initial session will be transposed into a technical instruction around stage fighting, with a contextual discussion around how/why this is a key feature of VDT’s work.

Participants will be encouraged to be playful with the notion of the staged fight, focusing on an absurd and grotesque stylisation over an attempt at aping a realistic looking fight. Participants will create a set, structured physical sequence, to which choreographic filters will then be applied. This material will be shared and lead into a further discussion around the task, presenting violence on stage and the responsibilities of the maker in doing so.

‘The atmosphere created was open, I felt free and not judged.’ Edge Hill University, BA student

MODULE 5: USE OF ENSEMBLE

VDT’s work always includes a ‘big dance number’: a folk dance, a downstage line up, a game of hide and seek, a silly dance, a complex group scene with objects (chairs, ammo boxes), a big fight scene, a unison movement sequence – all of which are designed to offer relief to an audience from the intense emotional content of solo and duet work and often appearing like a choreographic game, cohering the cast in a moment of unity and togetherness. This module explores:

– Ensemble work as a metaphor or representation of togetherness and difference (discussion into practical)
– Folk dance as a key element in VDT’s work, representing the cultural range of performers on stage (practical)
– Ensemble sequences as a device for changing the energy and dynamic on stage (practical)
– Building a scene (discussion into practical)
– Slow motion and other key VDT choreographic filters (discussion into practical)

Example of content

Participants will begin by playing a series of games that explore group dynamics, before adapting these games into an audience-facing series of activities, led by the facilitator that examine how performers are ‘read’ by an audience. Through group discussion the learning will be applied to the creation of a group folk dance with individuals contributing to the composition of the dance to convey aspects of identity (group/individual/cultural) and a sense of togetherness, in a shared activity that has a celebratory, fun style.

‘It flowed really well from one thing to the next. A very cohesive workshop.’ London Contemporary Dance School BA student

MODULE 6: PHYSICAL SETTING

Vincent’s approach to set design is deliberately low-tech, recycled and un-ornate, favouring vintage looking objects from the real world that have a history: tables, chairs, balloons, blackboards, buckets, stones, ammo boxes, mic stands, real looking baby dolls, theatre flat, costumes, sets and props. Vincent rarely uses primary colours in the work, preferring muted and earthy colours which suit the tone of much of her work, unless a pop of colour is designed to visually shock they eye: a splash of red fake blood, a bright pink dress. Vincent always considers floor textures leaves, grass, soil, rocks and containing the space as a clearly theatrical realism with a back wall for entering from or sometimes opening up and exposing the real (theatre / site specific) space the performers find themselves in. Live or sung music can also influence performance This module explores:

– Providing a performative ‘context’ with staging and stage design (discussion)
– Building scenes with real world objects as creative tools (discussion into practical)
– Costume and creative play to generate movement ideas and consolidate personae (practical)

Example of content

Participants will learn a section of repertoire that encapsulates key aspects of VDT’s approach to the use of physical objects. Once learnt, this scene will be deconstructed by participants, revealing the process involved and the role the object played in the creation process. Participants will then embark on a series of tasks to create and build material and a scene themselves, based around objects and in relation to music/song.

‘Being guided to use movement to evoke true emotions in a comfortable space was significantly effective.’ Kendal College student

MODULE 7: TRANSLATING LIVE WORK INTO FILM INSTALLATIONS

VDT has a long history of capturing and adapting work on film. This module will cover:

– Spontaneous adaptation – identifying and bringing the key aspects of a staged work to screen (discussion into practical)
– The filming and editing process –capture or new translation? (discussion into practical) Augmenting and expanding the stage version into the physically impossible (discussion into practical)
– Considering the different ways audiences engage with screened work and the opportunities for reaching audiences digital capture creates (discussion)

Example of content

Participants will learn a gestural movement sequence from VDT’s repertory and see video footage of it in its original staged context. We will discuss the key aspects of that material and what/how it communicates with the audience. In small groups participants will then explore ways for that material to be captured for screen. Initially this will be within a “whatever you can imagine” framework, before then focusing in on an achievable version to attempt. Having shared and discussed their ideas with the whole group, and with support from the workshop leader, groups will then film the material on phones, altering it and staging it as they wish.The outcomes of this will be shared and lead into a discussion on the editing process and or an opportunity to quick edit the material, if time allows.

Contact

To discuss specific modules for a socially engaged choreographic workshop or residency, please contact General Manager on admin@vincentdt.com.