Unrehearsed Futures: Conversations in Theatre Pedagogy
Possibility, Plurality, and Planetarity
Unrehearsed Futures is a series of public conversations about the realities of teaching and practicing drama in these changing times, held between global drama school heads, performance trainers, theatre makers and drama scholars.
This series looks at the pedagogical approaches to teaching in the absence of presence, the benefits and challenges of alternative technologies, mediums and formats for live performance, the shapes, forms and directions theatre can take, thereby informing the community’s approach to long-term scenario planning.
Organized by:
Drama School Mumbai
Embodied Poetics
Centre for Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies, University of Cape Town
Curator bios:
Amy Russell is Founder and Pedagogic Director of Embodied Poetics, which offers exploratory workshops and three-month summer intensives on the pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq, Jacques Copeau and Suzanne Bing in London, U.K., internationally and online. She is the Pedagogic Co-founder of the London International School of Performing Arts (L.I.S.P.A.) and founder and Chair of the Naropa University M.F.A. in Lecoq-based Actor Created Theatre. She has taught theatre creation internationally since 2003, at schools and conservatories, theatre companies and festivals. She is also an award-winning playwright and a qualified and accredited Gestalt psychotherapist and group facilitator. Her doctoral research at the University of Tasmania, Australia, is focused on theatre devising as a practice of social space.
Jehan Manekshaw: Since his Masters in Theatre Direction from the University of London, Jehan Manekshaw’s contributions to the Indian theatre sphere have been considerable. He founded and heads the Drama School Mumbai, driven to forging a new generation of theatre-makers, is director of Theatre Professionals to promote theatre-based learning through school education, and has built partnerships across theatre institutions to strengthen the training and upskilling of theatre professionals. His contribution has been acknowledged by the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the Indian government's apex body for performing arts and culture, by conferring Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar (award). With a rich background in pedagogy, and practice, Jehan conceptualised Unrehearsed Futures, and co-curates it with peers for a global, holistic overview of the challenges facing the theatre industry.
Mbongeni N. Mtshali works across a range of performance disciplines, including dance and movement composition and performance, animation and puppetry, and site-specific performance installation among others. He earned a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, as well as the Standard Bank Silver Ovation Award and the Fleur du Cap Theatre Award for his achievements in directing and performance-making. Mtshali is primarily interested in black queer/femme performance in South Africa as well as Africa and its diaspora, turning towards queer genealogies of African decolonial world-making in the Caribbean, South Atlantic and Indian Ocean. These research interests frame his practical and theoretical enquiries - with Unrehearsed Futures, as another venture into understanding the broader landscape of global theatre practice.
Mwenya B. Kabwe is a Zambian-born maker of theatre and performance, facilitator of creative processes, a performer, writer, arts educator and scholar with migrant tendencies. Her creative practice is focused on contemporary African theatre and performance, immersive and site specific performance work, live art, collaborative and interdisciplinary art making and re-imagining African futures. She has lectured and taught performance theory and practice in the Drama Departments at the University of Cape Town, Wits University and the Market Theatre Laboratory and is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of Cape Town.