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Teaching ScreenStage composition

Students improvising physical stories and filmmaking, Katowice 2023, Byrom 2017.

Performance Studies 

Physical theatre & ScreenStage Performance

ScreenStage: an Intermedial Composition course / workshop: exploring creative interactions of the virtual and live reresentations as hybrid performance, and developing strategies of meaning creation. By improvisations, games and sensuous experiences I explore with students the hybrid live-virtual action and the boundaries between man and technology, using projected and live joint moving images, in various performative modules (such as site spesific and immersive theatre).

Introduction to intermediality (UG) / Enstranged Transmediation (Graduates) - theory: this theoretic course, imbued with videoed performances and PPT, is based on dialogue and questioning rather than front-on academic lecture. It is an open discourse of the performance scene in the context of the relations between art and human communication systems from a semiotic and phenomenological viewpoints. Whether taught as a short series of discussions or within a longer process, it is best taught parallel to a practical composition process, as the two complete each other.

workshops (developed in different formats):

  1. Motion and Sight, and Meaning

  2. Immediate and Mediated Communication

  3. Experiencing and Developing Concepts for Live/Virtual Hybridity

  4. Physical Action Extended by Virtuality

  5. Cinematic and Stage Conventions – Entangled

Lectures

  1. Intermedial Scores - scores representing transmediation, used for creating, embodying, communicating, analysing.

  2. Hybridity and Perception – the perceptual activity as the subject matter of the ScreenStage performance.

  3. Intermedial Enstrangement Strategies – Immersiveness and Enstrangement entalgled.

  4. SEASONS – a ScreenStage Poem: about the embodiment of transmediation in the practice process of this show.

  5. ScreenStage Performance: transmedial narration strategies, conventions and sign-making.

  6. The Hybrid Action in ScreenStage Performance: Physical theatre and movement Notations – combined.

 

Other courses / lecture demonstrations

Physical theatre: through improvisation and composition studio-laboratories we explore nonverbal and verbal expression and action; experiencing and inventing narration strategies, aspiring to illogic, open and associative realm of imagination and motivations.

Composition by Eshkol Wachman Movement Notation principles: learning the space-time mechanisms and logic of EWMN, and use it as inspiration and/or guidelines for creative processes that embody the notation's principles of movement composition and analysis.

In my work with lecturers, artists and students I look into today's most pressing challenge: our relationships with artificial technologies and with the virtual realms.

My ScreenStage practice is being developed as an artistic form through my research of intermediality and transmediation. SInce 2009 it is also being explored and developed through teaching and co-teaching in various academic programs.

I have developed an interdisciplinary course of composition that explores intermedial concepts, which I have named ScreenStage Performance (SSP). My composition classes focus on performance making. The studio is referred to as a research laboratory, where practice/research methods are devised and developed mainly through improvisations methods, reflective writing, performance analysis, presentations and discussions informed by relevant theories.


As a composition method my ScreenStage concept embodies and explores physical theatre principles and conventions, such as nonverbal action, performative conventions and narrative strategies, as well as movement notation principles and conceptual thinking. However these are expanded in a new context of intertextual and intermedial live-virtual hybrids. The creative process yields terminology and transmedial strategies designed to integrate the features and the conventional systems of virtual and live representations, hybridising these into transmedial feasible narrative / concept.

The course was initially developed through co-teaching UG students with video artist Lee Yanor, and is developed as practice-based research for Graduates in academic frameworks, mainly at Dance SMKB Tel Aviv, AST bytom, and in the Dance Division of the Music Academy in Katowice, Poland. My intermedial approach to composition and its theoretical grounding is shared and reflected upon with lecturers, artists and scholars of the performing arts.

Teaching ScreenStage Composition

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