Performances Season Schedule Members Workshops Company History Newsletter Reviews Contact us Return Home Exchange Session led by Corporeal Mime artist, Selma Trevino, in the NACL Catskills space, 2001 Exchange 2002 What's the Story? An Inquiry into Narrative in Theatrical Performance Organized by Thomas Bartscherer and Brad Krumholz and Sponsored by The New York Council for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities I. Structure In addition to providing a venue for the public performance of new theatre, the Catskill Festival offers participants the opportunity to engage in a collective exploration of theatre and performance in the context of the Exchange Sessions. These sessions bring together artists and scholars with diverse interests and backgrounds for three days of active exchange and discussion. The Exchange Sessions, which will run from 5-7 August, have two components: Daytime Sessions These will be attended by all of the artists and scholars involved in the festival and will be dedicated to exploration through active participatory exchange. They will include both physical and vocal work, and may involve, among other things, group workshop exercises, guided individual activities, and demonstrations of training exercises or works-in-progress. Representatives from the various participating groups will take turns leading these sessions. Evening Sessions The evening sessions are attended again by all of the artists and scholars, and are also open to the public. They will provide the opportunity for collective inquiry through focused discussion. Monday and Tuesday nights will feature presentations by invited guests, which will be followed by moderated discussions. On Wednesday night, the Toronto-based company Number 11 Theatre will present a work in progress. The subsequent concluding discussion will encompass all the themes explored over the three-day period. II. Theme This year, the Exchange Sessions will focus on the question of narrative within theatrical performance. We will examine conventional approaches to dramatic narrative and the place (or absence) of narrative in recent and contemporary experimental theater. Dramatic texts have always posed a vexing complex of questions in regard to narrative. Plato, the earliest western critic of drama, observed that the playwright is, in an important sense, always hidden behind multiple characters and never speaks directly to the reader. This immediately raises questions: whose narrative is it? Whose thoughts are being represented in a dramatic text, and from what perspective? When we move from a dramatic text to a performance on stage, the questions multiply. For now the audience must grapple not only with the relationship between the author and the characters, but also with the layers of interpretation that intervene de facto when the artists involved in the staging of the play ­ actor, director, set designer, etc. ­ execute their several functions. Innovations in western theater practice in the past fifty years introduce an even more radical set of questions. Much avant-garde theater in recent times has shifted emphasis away from the text and toward the art of the actor and the ritual meeting of spectator and performer in the theatrical event. Some contemporary theater derives from collaborative group work that does not necessarily begin with a dramatic text as such: each of the artists involved contributes over time to the creative process, which is usually overseen by a director, and which may or may not employ a playwright or dramaturge. Indeed, this has often been the favored method of groups that have performed at previous NACL festivals, and of other groups past and present who share a loosely defined but clearly discernable aesthetic heritage. Speaking more broadly, one can say that many theater artists of the last half-century, particularly those working outside the mainstream, have shown a sustained interest in testing the very boundaries of narrative in drama and in exploring more abstract and discontinuous modes of performance. The Catskill Festival Exchange Sessions will explore the narrative question in depth by looking at both historical examples and contemporary practice. In any given theatrical performance, whose story is being told? Who is the teller? What are the functions of text and of plot? What is the role of the playwright? The dramaturge? How do elements such as text, narrative, and plot relate to other elements such a movement, sound, and spectacle? Such questions will be explored in thought and action, through performance and presentation, through observation and discussion. The Evening Sessions are open to the public free of charge. Evening Session Presenters include: Bruce Barton Thomas Bartscherer Larry Bogad Carrie Lee Joe Martin Jeff Morrison Saviana Stanescu   Internal Exchange- Festival 2001 Back to Festival Page

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