Describing one’s practice

18May10

We spoke with Rachel last week about how we were a tad confused as to what our role was within this project/module. Are we representatives of TiPP, the Academy, our programme or our work?

When discussing this with Rachel the waters got a little murky when Rachel was talking about actors, scenes, dialogue and forms of theatre in which we would use a memory and act it out. We attempted, pretty poorly, to explain what it is that we do at the Academy, and we still couldn’t get it across for Rachel to understand the type of work we make. Sarah and I spoke about Palimpsest*, the work that we made for Into The New, and this didn’t come across well. So, the question that is posed is, how do we describe our practice to people who are not from our background/training/devising nature?

I describe myself as a Creative and Educational Artist. What does this mean? It means that I am an artist working within performance and educational contexts, I believe my practice to be rooted within applied and social contexts, challenging the quality of making work with non-performers with a professionally considered approach. How do I describe this to someone who may not be used to these terms, or someone who has different ideas to what performance and theatre is? I simply place it down to this; my passion is to work with people to make performance. I am engaged and excited by the challenges of working in non conventional ways with groups other than trained performers to develop work that connects with people, and is from a real and grounded place. Why did I decide to to Tipp? To work with a different group of people in a different and challenging context in order to develop my performance making and facilitation skills, whilst also informing my practice more to the realities and challenges of working in a context which is rarely considered or overlooked.

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