Access to the full text of the entire article is only available to members of institutions that have purchased access. If you belong to such an institution, please log in or find out more about how to order.
Postmodern acting has interrogated the idea of a unified subject and individual agency in a variety of ways. Its avoidance of characterisation means it is often understood more broadly as performance.
This video is documentation taken from a weekly contact jam session with the
actors in the MFA Actor-Training program at UC Irvine. Contact Improvisation is
a large part of the movement arc in the first year of actor training, and jam
sessions are held weekly, integrating all three years of MFA actors.
Someone happened to video this session, and I give a brief description of
our use of contact as a tool for actor training in the
voice-over.
Soldier, Child, Tortured Man (1989) was Goat Island’s first performance. It considered the physical and mental conditioning that militarises first the individual and then the social structure.
The Lastmaker (2007) was Goat Island’s ninth and final performance, composed by the group with ending in mind. The piece took its inspiration from the historical trajectory of the Hagia Sophia.
A six-part series featuring conversations with some of the foremost trainers across
four continents on subjects ranging from the cultural and political to
the professional and pedagogical.
Iben Nagel Rasmussen is an actor, director, teacher and writer born in Denmark. She has been a member of Odin Teatret since 1966 and conducts independent research as leader of ‘The Bridge of Winds’.
Challenging ideas of coherent identity, universal value and truth as not only impossible but also duplicitous, postmodernism explores how meaning is always multiple and contingent on contexts.