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Transversal Acting Workshop |
Generated from the social, cognitive, and performance theories, aesthetics, and critical methodologies of transversal poetics, transversal acting emerged during the Transversal Theater Company’s rehearsals of its productions over the last four years, and continues to develop through the ongoing Transversal Acting Workshop, which meets regularly in the Jerzy Grotowski Barn on the campus of the University of California, Irvine. Our approach begins from the premise that vulnerabilities, surrenders, and slippages can be more productive than control, domination, and regulation. Moreover, we posit that events, rather than narratives or histories, most profoundly define experience, however incomprehensible they may appear without ready contextualizations or explanations. For transversal acting, it is moments of engagement with the environments that affect and mobilize the actor, and not just or predominately the other way around, although these processes are always interconnected. Keenly aware and responsive, the actor achieves performance agency through the in-between, transversal spacetimes of actions, interfaces, articulations, and departures. The actor willfully frees herself of control so that unpredictability can occur and she can learn to navigate the limits and thresholds of consciousnesses and subjectivities. It is here that eventualizations and momentous discoveries are powerfully realized. The Transversal Acting Workshop works to develop the awareness and skills that make such experiences not only possible, but also manifestable at the will of the actor.
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