Creating Complex Characters with Julia Pascal

How do we move away from simplistic tropes and stereotypes to create challenging theatre that questions the status quo? How do we create multi-layered, complex characters who defy cliché? These are the questions at the heart of this course.

Julia Pascal draws on radical theatre techniques from Yiddish and Eastern European Theatre during this one week intensive to provoke and expand theatre techniques for writers, directors and performers. This is aimed at creatives who wish to explore imaginative methods of making innovative and challenging theatre.

Students will be focusing on freeing the self from learned vocabularies and work towards a theatre which surprises and stimulates.  By the end of the week the participants will have learned new skills and ways of theatre-making to increase daring and develop practice.

During this week-long course students will:

• Investigate techniques that can help a writer, performer or director develop original and complex characters that avoid cliché and tropes.
• Engage with theatre techniques that are political, disruptive and challenge the status quo - a Theatre of Activism.
• Explore radical storytelling and how to work without self-censorship.
• Explore the joke as a method for creating structure and of subverting stereotypes  - drawing on the importance of satire in Yiddish Theatre.

On the final day students will present a piece of individual work, explored during the week, which will be creatively discussed. A second draft of this performative work will be shared at the end of the day.

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