Workshop | Mael Cheff — Emerging Stories

Emerging Stories is a theatre and transformative justice workshop focused on collaborative work and improvisation, where we will apply traditional and contemporary performance tools to a purpose of engaged storytelling.

The workshop is open to anyone with basic experience in storytelling and performance—regardless of discipline—as we will quickly dive into experimentation.

And because the dream of life on earth depends on critical relationships, we will foster a bottom-up participatory framework, embracing the multiplicity of voices to help us recentre our vision of one another and, in turn, co-create new collective narratives.

CONTENT

Emerging Stories is an experimental lab of creative strategies that grant access to the new myths and narratives that need to shape culture and write history today.

We will experiment with queer-feminist approaches that explore dramatic tension (as opposed to dramatic conflict).

Through acting exercises and improvisations inspired by the work of theatre and/or queer thinkers and practitioners (such as Boal, Moss, Rodenburgh, AMB, hooks, Oliver), we will experience what I call embodied dramaturgical exploration.

We will use various techniques drawn from testimonial theatre, improvisational theatre, playback/Theatre of the Oppressed, and various embodied dramaturgy tools.

By merging improvisational theatre and transformative social justice, this workshop offers participants a space to explore methodologies for creating externalized narratives from our authentic wisdom—rather than from outdated structures.

We will build trust conducive to vulnerable work through a progression of solo, team, and small group exercises.

We will take time to integrate and discuss, in the hope of generating new conversations about how stories organize people, belonging, accountability, collaboration, and radical imaginaries.