About the workshop
As an interdisciplinary, improvisational performer and workshop facilitator, workshop instructor Lorene Bouboushian is captivated by the underlying motives for any action. In workshops and lab-based environments, often it is assumed that we should follow our “interests” or “intentions,” when in fact our in-the-moment actions are a result not of clear-cut decisions but our relationship to the organism of bodies, room and objects around us colliding with what’s inside us. What do we want and why? What if we derailed ourselves, worked with our own insincerity, faked ourselves out, played tricks? Is it possible to create a realm where as much as possible is valid and nothing is right? Bring comfortable clothes, an object you would like to play with and can share, and writing materials.
About the instructor
Lorene Bouboushian considers their class a powerful way to shift roles of student and facilitator/teacher. Using somatic visualization and exercises as a starting point, we confront our bodies and experience vocalizing as expansive resonance, movement as creature-like transformation, and performance as social disturbance. They create a space for improvisation that is both safe and dangerous: safe for the full expression and observation of the self, and an open portal to express dangerous parts of oneself–the dark, rebellious, and derelict. In this context, they make clear that there are no assumed boundaries or rules, and they instruct as they participate, breaking the barrier between student and teacher.
Their interdisciplinary workshops combine voice, somatic/body based principles for performance, and work with performative objects. They always desire to teach people with a wide range of life practices. They have taught university students in Beirut, Lebanon (NAHNOO), Puebla, Mexico (UDLAP), and University of Kentucky-Lexington, as well as performance artists, singers, theorists, babies, poets, families. Their aim is to create contact points between different kinds of people and experiences, and a temporary sense of community.
This workshop has been developed over three years of their performance workshops taking place in New York, Chicago, Puebla (MX), and Beirut. Recent workshops were produced through University of Kentucky-Lexington, where they were a guest artist, and The Exponential Festival. Past classes were at CLASSCLASSCLASS at the New Museum, as well as the Performancy Forum Quinquennial at Grace Exhibition Space and GET YOUR A$$ IN CLA$$ at Abrons Art Center.