The Centre for Performance Research have invited some of the most exciting and diverse Wales based and international theatre directors to Aberystwyth for an intensive participatory project that offers a
rare opportunity for both experienced and emerging directors to gather and share the methods, approaches and skills of professional directing practice via laboratories and presentations, demonstrations and dialogue.

There are still some spaces on the second round of laboratories (Tuesday 13th - Thursday 15th April) and at the Gathering (Friday 16th - Sunday 18th April) so book now!

The first set of labs are now underway but if you weren't able to come you can still join us for news on laboratory findings and the exploratory process online.

CPR's Bursary Barters will be reporting daily on the Directors' Forum blog - http://thedirectorsforum.blogspot.com/

Laboratories - Wednesday 13th - Thursday 15th April

Adrian Jackson, Cardboard Citizens, UK

http://www.cardboardcitizens.org.uk/

Adrian Jackson is the founder-director and chief executive of a unique theatre company, Cardboard Citizens, in which most of the performers are homeless and ex-homeless people, refugees or asylum-seekers. Founded in 1992, the company tours theatre productions, especially inter-active
Forum theatre, to all sorts of venues, including hostels, day centres, schools and theatres; apart from the interactive Forum Theatre shows the company is renowned for, it has also mounted a number of larger-scale usually site-specific productions, including The Beggar’s Opera (with ENO), The Lower
Depths (with London Bubble), and Mincemeat. In September 2003, Adrian directed a co-production of Pericles for Cardboard Citizens with the Royal Shakespeare Company. This was followed in
November 2004 with a co-commissioning of playwright Sarah Woods, resulting in a new play Visible which was performed at the RSC’s New Work Festival, and in 2006 at Soho Theatre and touring. In Autumn 2006 he directed a site-specific production of Timon of Athens, as part of the RSC’s Complete Works festival, and at Belfast Festival. In 2007, he devised and directed Down/Out, a reaction to George Orwell, Going Going Gone
for Cardboard Citizens, and Home and Away for Formaat Theatre in Rottterdam.

In 2009, he directed Mincemeat, which gained five star reviews and won the Evening Standard award for best design. He also gave the keynote speech at the World Forum Theatre Festival in Austria.

He is also a well-travelled teacher and translator, having translated five books by Augusto Boal and taught the Theatre of the Oppressed extensively in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. He is currently working on his own book, provisionally entitled The Art of the Joker.

Adrian Jackson has made a series of productions (Pericles, Timon, Mincemeat), which use text, testimony and devising techniques to place current and historical material within a theatrical context, without
slavish adherence to notions of verbatim theatre.

This laboratory will explore the presentation of truth and history, personal and national. A particular focus of the exploration is likely to be the story of the Chagos Islanders who were forcibly removed from the island of Diego Garcia in the 1970's; the subsequent use of the island for military purposes, including extraordinary rendition flights; the documents relating to the creation of a Marine Protection Area around the islands in recent months.

Veenapani Chawla, Adishakti Centre, India

http://www.adishaktitheatrearts.org/index.htm

Veenapani Chawla founded Adishakti in 1981 and is its Managing Trustee and Artistic Director.
Adishakti is a performance company engaged in the research and
reanimation of traditional knowledge in theatre, dance, music, movement, puppet
and craft forms with a view to creating a contemporary hybrid aesthetic and performance language.

Adishakti's work and experiments cover those areas, which elliptically involve the performer and her environment medicine,architecture/construction technolog ies and the eco system. For Adishakti is driven, quite simply, by its apprehension of art/aesthetic practice as a unique bridge not only between
diverse performance forms, traditions and knowl edge systems but also in fact between a range of diverse realms, which are not normally or visibly in communication with each other.

Veenapani has been recognized by grants from the Ford Foundation, the Charles Wallace India Trust, the Department of Culture, the Det Lange Udvalga in Denmark and the India Foundation of the Arts. In 1988, she was nominated to the Advisory Committee of the Kathak Kendra (Sangeet Natak Academy, New Delhi, India), and in 1994 was awarded an extended Senior Fellowship from the Department of Culture in New Delhi. In 1997 she was nominated by the Department of Culture as an expert in the fields of Folk, Traditional and Indigenous Arts.

In 1998, she was appointed Trustee on the Board of Trustees of the National Folklore Support Centre, Chennai.

Focusing on storytelling, the dramatisation of concepts using different forms of expression and on the role of rhythm as an inner text; this laboratory will reveal Adishakti's unique performance
practice.

Das Beckwerk, Denmark

http://dasbeckwerk.com/

In the year of 2001, the author, playwright, performer, musician and human being Claus Beck-Nielsen, was declared dead. In 2002 Das Beckværk, a theatre and arts house, was opened in his name to govern
and develop the life and work of Beck-Nielsen. The company had it's headquarters
in a former reactor on the outskirts of Copenhagen. But in 2006 the name was changed to Das Beckwerk, now a trans-national corporation with the globalized world stage as its target and audience.

Through staging of world politics, public spaces and media Das Beckwerk seeks to establish an active link between the individual world citizen and the contemporary world history. In this way Das Beckwerk
creates stories about the hopeless, but necessary attempt to daily intervene in world history. Stories that can take shape as walks, serial photography, novels, performances, concerts, installations, video, historic events and guided museum tours. Stories about the common man and his heroic, yet naive
attempt to gain influence on the creation of world history.

Participants in this Laboratory will work with the director and dramaturg of Das Beckwerk and four British media/former actors to develop material that shall form the scenes of a new theatre - The Theatre of
the Spectre, the Medium and Humiliation.

Ruth Kanner, Ruth Kanner Theatre Group, Israel

In this laboratory of practical investigation, participants will explore the two central forces energizing theatrical creation: the drive to create organized informative structures, alongside with
the impulse to let the untidy, the uncontrolled and the unexpected invade the scene.

Ruth Kanner Theater Group has been engaged, since 1998, in exploring its own surroundings by searching for a local theatrical language, interweaving storytelling, physical theater and visual imagery. The group re-examination of hegemonic Israeli narratives is performed through literary and documentary texts, creating Storytelling Theater. The struggle to translate a text that was not originally created
for the stage into the language of the theater provides an opportunity to explore and expand the limits of stage language.

"Kanner’s group is a high-quality, unique and creative home for

artistic theater…compelling story-telling theater, virtuosic and

multi-faceted." Tel Aviv News

"Ruth Kanner and her acting group raise the art of storytelling-theater to new heights…masterpiece acting in which every little
detail of body and soul is treated perfectly and exhaustively" The Stage

"A pure pool of superb theater … a huge achievement …brilliant moments… countless stage inventions…amazing
theater…" The City

The Gathering

Friday 16th - Sunday 18th April

Following the six days of intensive laboratories, practical investigations and expositions, the ‘Directors Forum’ concludes with two-and-a half days of encounters to: draw together elements of the practical
investigations; launch further enquiry, provocation and interrogation;
encourage discussion and debate; platform several key speakers and
international guests who will create illuminating contemporary and historical
perspectives on the director’s role and offer case studies from other nations
that have echoes of the geographic, demographic and bi-lingual complexity of
Wales.

Guest Directors Include:

Veenapani Chawla (Adishakti Centre, India), Das Beckwerk (Denmark), Jaroslaw Fret (Teatr ZAR, Poland), Richard Gregory (Quarantine, UK), Bill Hamblett (Small World Theatre, Wales), Natalie Hennedige (Cake Theatre, Singapore), Adrian Jackson (Cardboard Citizens, UK), Ruth Kanner (Ruth Kanner Theatre Group, Israel), Julian Maynard Smith (Station House Opera, UK), John McGrath (National Theatre of Wales), Anders Paulin (Sweden), Mike Pearson (Pearson/Brookes, Wales), Ralf Richardt Strøbech (Hotel Pro Forma/ Loop Group, Denmark), Tore Vagn Lid (Transiteatret-Bergen, Norway).

Cost: From £50, contact CPR for more information -

The Centre for Performance Research

Email: cprwww@aber.ac.uk

Phone: +44 (0)1970 622 133

Web: www.thecpr.org.uk

The Directors Forum has been made possible with the support of a project grant from the Arts Council of Wales.

The Centre for Performance Research at Aberystwyth is a joint venture of The University of Wales Aberystwyth and Centre for Performance Research Ltd, working
in close association with AU Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies.
Centre for Performance Research Ltd is an Educational Charity (No. 701544)
limited by guarantee (Reg. No. 231 5790).