School

The Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance Training

ADVANCED PERFORMANCE TRAINING (APT)

APT is a 2-year certificate granting program.

The school is a center of creation – dynamic, energetic, messy, collaborative and ever-evolving.  APT is composed of forward-thinking theatre-makers with a desire to forge new boundaries for live performance.  Students train in the skills needed to be a 21st century theatre artist: physical conditioning, movement analysis, acrobatics, voice, play, improvisation, theatre creation, and dance.  Students, guided by an international and award-winning faculty, look far and wide for inspiration, from architecture to masks to street theatre to opera to the rhythms of nature and the rhythms of the city, always with the goal of making immediate and arresting theatre.

The first year focuses on the fundamental building blocks of live performance: rhythm, dynamic, space, the expressive voice and body, the relationship between performer and audience, character and the arc of a story or journey onstage.  

The second year is centered on the myriad paths the work of the first year can take: melodrama, commedia dell'arte, circus, clown, tragedy, dance-theatre, music-theatre, grotesque, site-specific theatre, comic forms including vaudeville and variety shows, and hybrid forms.

Students are in class between 4 and 7 hours daily, pursuing courses that are designed to train the total theatre artist.    Throughout each of the six 10-week trimesters, students work collaboratively on projects, practicing theatre-making with their peers for faculty evaluation.  The second year features several public performances and the school culminates in presentations of original student-created work.

Homepage

Go to Pig Iron Theatre Company website

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