The Columbia College Chicago Theatre Department is offering a 10 percent discount to Columbia College Chicago alumni who register for a series of workshops in “The Art of Movement at the Service of the Actor” by master teacher Norman Taylor, widely regarded as one of the finest international ambassadors of the pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq.
The workshops take place Friday-Sunday, October 9-11, from 10 AM to 5 PM each day at Columbia College Chicago, 916 S. Wabash, room 223. The regular cost for the three-day workshop experience is $350. Columbia alumni will receive a 10 percent discount. To apply, click here.
Taylor, who worked with Lecoq as a student and then teacher for more than 20 years at the Ecole Internationale de Theatre Jacques Lecoq in Paris, will explore three fundamental components of Lecoq’s approach to artistic training: the analysis of movement, physical storytelling, and the actor-as-creator. By drawing upon the inspiration of music, painting, and poetry, the workshops will explore styles of storytelling that include spoken word, pantomime blanche, the language of gesture, and sound. Working from short stories by Chekhov and Poe, the workshop will culminate in the collective creation of original physical theatre pieces.
“We’re thrilled that we can have a teacher of Norman Taylor’s caliber, experience, and artistry come to Chicago,” says Michael Brown, Director of Columbia College’s newly launched MFA in European Devised Performance Practice, whose curriculum is deeply rooted in the teachings of Jacques Lecoq. “Lecoq’s hugely influential approach to teaching physical theatre and devised work was aimed at training actors to discover their own deeper creativity and to explore modes of performance that suited that creativity. His approach, and that of Norman Taylor, is less about a codified set of skills and more about a road to deeper creative expression. This will be a wonderful experience for those lucky enough to work with Norman.”
Norman Taylor has taught with the Movement Theatre Studio in New York for the past eight years. He teaches Lecoq’s techniques throughout Europe and Latin America and is on faculty at the renowned Lassaad International School Theatre in Belgium. His visit to Chicago offers actors a unique opportunity to develop a heightened sense of their body in performance with one of the world’s greatest teachers of physical theatre. Participants do not need to have studied Lecoq technique but do need to have a working familiarity with one or more theatrical movement techniques.Columbia College’s new Master of Fine Arts in European Devised Performance Practice–the only degree of its kind in America–offers students the chance to study in three great urban centers of innovative theatrical performance: Berlin, London, and Chicago. The program is offered in partnership with the cutting-edge London International School of Performing Arts (LISPA). For more information, e-mail Michael Brown at micbrown@colum.edu.
