Personalized Drama/The Incomplete Theater Text — Corina Copp (10 Sessions)

Fridays 7-9pm: 10 sessions begin February 7th

This workshop will be an attempt to consider the condition of the theater text, starting with what Alain Badiou calls its inherent “porosity” and “incompletion,” in relation to contemporary experimental performance writing and conceptual approaches to devised theater-making, as well as the redoing visible in work by cross-genre dramatists like Ingeborg Bachmann and Elfriede Jelinek, among others. Commitment to some reading constraints required. Course will be treated both as group discussion and personalized tutorial, with each workshop participant devoting focus to 4-6 plays by one playwright, depending on interests, writing and instructor recommendation.

“The theatre text exhibits the very law of desire, since here the subject exists only as linked to [her] discourse. And nothing else….Except that in the end some body is put forth to be marked by these words.” And so we’ll question this scene of a text in its impossible future anterior. Writers and artists we’ll look to include (in no particular order and subject to change): Kristen Kosmas, Young Jean Lee, Heiner Müller, Reza Abdoh, Harold Pinter, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Maria Irene Fornes, Sarah Kane, Richard Foreman, Suzan Lori-Parks, Peter Handke, Will Eno, Karinne Keithley Syers, Big Dance Theater, Anne Washburn, Thomas Bradshaw, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Thomas Bernhard, and Else Lasker-Schüler.

Not all hope lost! We will spend the last two workshops on your writing. Culminates in short performance. And depending on schedules, we’ll spend one class seeing either Sara Greenberger Rafferty at the Whitney Biennial, or another show in the city. Ten participants max, so please join early if seriously interested and able to be present at all sessions. For best tutorial: Send as a writing sample a 1-2 page monologue or dialogue to info@poetryproject.org by January 31.

Corina Copp is the author of The Green Ray (Ugly Duckling Presse, Fall 2014); All Stock Must Go (Shit Valley Verlag, Cambridge, UK 2014); Miracle Mare (Trafficker 2013); and Pro Magenta/Be Met (UDP 2011). She studied playwriting with Mac Wellman at Brooklyn College.

This workshop is part of The Poetry Project’s “Workshop Residency” at Dixon Place and will meet at 161 Chrystie Street New York, NY 10002 – a short walk from the Project. Dixon Place was founded to provide a space for literary and performing artists to create and develop new works in front of a live audience. Our mutual interest in supporting the development of new work/work in progress makes it an ideal partnership!