THREE VISIONS OF PRESENCE: Lecoq, Chaikin, Okada

a 3-day performance workshop with Dan Rothenberg

What is the muscle that allows contact with the audience? How does the performer grab and shape the attention of the audience? How does an ensemble create a style—a complete performance world? 

Dan Rothenberg, Pig Iron’s ​co-founder and co-Artistic Director​, will teach a 3-session workshop digging into performer presence. Working with improvisation and on-your-feet writing, participants will be led through a series of provocations that are expansive, joyful, and demystifying. This workshop brings together touchstones from a nearly three-decade-long investigation of performance style that bridges experimental, clown-based, and cabaret-based techniques—drawing from encounters and collaborations with theater visionaries ​Jacques Lecoq, Joe Chaikin, ​and ​Toshiki Okada​.

 

About Dan Rothenberg

Dan is a co-founder and co-artistic director of Pig Iron Theatre Company. He has directed almost all of Pig Iron's original performance works, including the OBIE Award-winning Chekov Lizardbrain and Hell Meets Henry Halfway. Pig Iron's work has toured to 15 countries on four continents, with stops at the Humana Festival, Edinburgh Fringe, Under the Radar, TR Warszawa, Konfrontacje Teatralne Festival, and Tokyo Performing Arts Market. Dan has directed three critically acclaimed premieres by Toshiki Okada for the Play Company in New York City, a national tour for the Acting Company, and collaborations with the alt-comedy group Berserker Residents, new music outfit Bowerbird, and Sweden's Teater Slava. Pew Fellow; USA Artists Fellow. Dan teaches physical theater at the Pig Iron MFA and Certificate Programs. 

Dan trained with Jacques Lecoq in Paris, and Pig Iron’s roots are in Lecoq’s work with physical performance and clown. In 1999, legendary director and founder of the Open Theater Joseph Chaikin directed and developed Shut Eye with Pig Iron—from which emerged a new pedagogy called “Ordinary-Extraordinary.” Then in 2011-2013, Pig Iron collaborated with award-winning Japanese writer-director Toshiki Okada whose self-conscious writing and unique physical performance style have made him a sensation at festivals across Asia and Europe.