Chloé Déchery leads an MA Advanced Theatre Workshop at start of Sustained Independent Projects

'Making Performance: Playing with Facts and Fiction"

 Was this workshop useful for you? What stood out for you? How could it contribute to your work in future?

Note on Active Imagination taken at Performing Research Conference last week

'Every creative individual owes all that is greatest in his life to fantasy ... which is inconsistent wih the principle of serious work ... the debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable ...'
Jung 1921
Found this note in my notebook. It's from one of the MA Advanced Theatre Practice presentations at the Performing Research Conference.

The project I'm working on involves creating a space for the play of imagination.

Summer Writing Project

Have had the idea of trying to document this project by writing postcards from the National Gallery. This one is to Oriel Milton - who is 6 years old today.

MA Advanced Theatre Practice Presentation at Performing Research Conference

Summer Writing Project - Day Three - April 24

Fragment of Ugolino di Nerio's Santa Croce Altarpiece - The Way to Calvary 

Nervous encounter at the next table in the cafe

Summer Writing Project - Day Two - April 20

Summer Writing Project - Day One

This blog might have reached you from Italy. My original idea was to re-create a journey of 1972, writing a play for the Hampstead Theatre, and writing a blog as the main means of communicating with you. I imagined I would be working away at my work, and you would be working away at yours, and somehow the thoughts would flow between us. Well, at the eleventh hour Central decided this would not be a good idea, and would not be a good investment for the School.

So after thinking it through, I'm thinking I will try to undertake the project, so far as possible, without actually going to Italy. This is going to involve liberal doses of Dante - on the tube. And working in the National Gallery - as close as possible to works by the same artists I would have been looking at, if not the actual works themselves.

One of the ideas behind this project is the proposition that writing a play is just a kind of prolonged improvisation - just like any other improvisation - and just like any other improvisation has a great deal with creating the frame. One of the frames in this case will be the National Gallery. Whenever I can I intend to spend the morning there writing - looking at paintings similar to those I would have been close to in Italy.

What's the connection between the pictures and the writing? Well, that's a question I might try to unravel. If time allows.