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Station House Opera is a British performance art and theatre company. It was founded in 1980 by Julian Maynard Smith, who is still[ when? ] artistic director. Station House Opera had a long working relationship with Stichting Mickery Workshop in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Julian Maynard Smith (son of the evolutionary geneticist John Maynard Smith) and Miranda Payne founded the company in 1980, and Maynard Smith remains its artistic director. Maynard studied fine and performing arts in the 1970s and works as an actor, writer, performer and director. The company has worked with artists and others from many different fields. The work varies enormously in scale, appearance and location and uses spectacle to explore the intimate relationship between people and the environment they inhabit. Described as "Brilliant...one of Britain's most inventive experimental theatre companies" [1] and "unlike anything you've ever seen before", [2] the company has created spectacular projects in a variety of locations all over the world, from New York's Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage to Dresden's historic Frauenkirche and Salisbury Cathedral. More recently the work has been uniquely created for more intimate spaces in Europe, Asia and South America. Based in London, it is managed by Artsadmin.
The company has created over thirty productions. While some are stand-alone pieces, others form groups that explore general themes using a particular material or methodology. The first few plays, including Natural Disasters, were a part of Station House Opera's series of architectural performances which the company is still well known for. "Natural Disasters" was a show in which Station House Opera explored the medium of flying and spatial freedom. A lot of productions they have done involve the use of fly-ins and the 3-dimensional space. Many productions followed after that. Drunken Madness, Scenes From A New Jericho and Cuckoo destabilised the mundane physical world of the performers by taking the action precariously to the air.
These projects opened up the doors for the company to take more risks and in 1989 The Bastille Dances was commissioned to celebrate the bicentenary of the French Revolution. The piece started from the image of the revolution and continued to show the storming and demolition of Bastille and the scattering of its stones throughout Paris. The Bastille Dances was commissioned by Theatre de Cherboug and the London International Festival of theatre and funded by Arts Council of Great Britain. This opened up the company to begin touring during the 1990s. Other works similar to Bastille Dances, Dedesenn nn rrrrrr and The Salisbury Proverbs, used loose breeze blocks with which performers built, demolished and rebuilt structures of an architectural scale. Snakes and Ladders, Roadmetal Sweetbread and Mare's Nest used video projection to generate doubled versions of the action on stage that posed questions of perception and interpretation. Recent work such as Live from Paradise, Play on Earth, and The Other Is You has concentrated on video streaming over the internet to bring performances in different parts of the world together in the creation of a single event that is both physical and virtual. These works are meant to create an event that is physical and virtual.
The Opéra Bastille is a modern opera house in the 12th arrondissement of Paris, France. Inaugurated in 1989 as part of President François Mitterrand's Grands Travaux, it became the main facility of the Paris National Opera, France's principal opera company, alongside the older Palais Garnier; most opera performances are shown at the Bastille along with some ballet performances and symphony concerts, while Palais Garnier presents a mix of opera and ballet performances.
Experimental theatre, inspired largely by Wagner's concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, began in Western theatre in the late 19th century with Alfred Jarry and his Ubu plays as a rejection of both the age in particular and, in general, the dominant ways of writing and producing plays. The term has shifted over time as the mainstream theatre world has adopted many forms that were once considered radical.
Lilian Mary Baylis CH was an English theatrical producer and manager. She managed the Old Vic and Sadler's Wells theatres in London and ran an opera company, which became the English National Opera (ENO); a theatre company, which evolved into the English National Theatre; and a ballet company, which eventually became The Royal Ballet.
An artistic director is the executive of an arts organization, particularly in a theatre or dance company, who handles the organization's artistic direction. They are generally a producer and director, but not in the sense of a mogul, since the organization is generally a non-profit organization. The artistic director of a theatre company is the individual with the overarching artistic control of the theatre's production choices, directorial choices, and overall artistic vision. In smaller theatres, the artistic director may be the founder of the theatre and the primary director of its plays. In larger non-profit theatres, the artistic director may be appointed by the board of directors.
Strictly, digital theatre is a hybrid art form, gaining strength from theatre's ability to facilitate the imagination and create human connections and digital technology's ability to extend the reach of communication and visualization.
Stephen Robert Dixon is a British actor and academic.
Ping Chong is an American contemporary theater director, choreographer, video and installation artist. He was born in Toronto and raised in the Chinatown section of New York City. Chong is internationally recognized as a director, and a creator of interdisciplinary theater work. He is an early pioneer of interdisciplinary theater and the integration of media into it. Chong is considered a seminal figure in Asian American theater and the Asian American arts movement.
DV8 Physical Theatre was a physical theatre company based at Artsadmin in London, United Kingdom. It was officially founded in 1986 by Lloyd Newson (1986–2015), Michelle Richecoeur (1986–1988) and Nigel Charnock. Lloyd Newson led the company as choreographer and artistic director from its inception, apart from the production My Sex, Our Dance (1986), which was co-created and performed with Nigel Charnock. DV8 officially ended in April 2022 when Lloyd Newson announced his retirement via the company web page.
Artsadmin is a UK-based organisation founded in 1979 by Judith Knight, MBE and Seonaid Stewart, providing project management, producing, support and resources for artists working in the fields of performance, dance, live art and mixed media work. They became increasingly aware of the lack of producing and administrative support for independent artists and companies, and set up Artsadmin as a reaction to this. Early partners included Hesitate and Demonstrate, Mike Figgis, Pip Simmons, Welfare State International, Smith and Goody and Natasha Morgan amongst others. They established a strong relationship with the Mickery Theater Amsterdam which provided a gateway to the rest of Europe, and many projects were subsequently co-produced in partnership with European theatres and festivals.
Chamber Made, formerly known as Chamber Made Opera, is an Australian arts organisation based in Melbourne, creating work operating at the intersections of music, sound and contemporary performance.
S. Ama Wray, known formally as Sheron Wray, is a dancer, teacher, choreographer and theatre director. She studied under Jane Dudley at the London Contemporary Dance School, later performing with the London Contemporary Dance Theatre and the Rambert Dance Company, and forming her own company, JazzXchange, in 1992. She presently is associate professor of dance at the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the University of California, Irvine.
Crystal Pite is a Canadian choreographer and dancer. She began her professional dance career in 1988 at Ballet BC, and in 1996 she joined Ballett Frankfurt under the tutelage of William Forsythe. After leaving Ballett Frankfurt she became the resident choreographer of Montreal company Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal from 2001 to 2004. She then returned to Vancouver where she focused on choreographing while continuing to dance in her own pieces until 2010. In 2002 she formed her own company called Kidd Pivot, which produced her original works Uncollected Work (2003), Double Story (2004), Lost Action (2006), Dark Matters (2009), The You Show (2010), The Tempest Replica (2011), Betroffenheit (2015), and Revisor (2019) to date. Throughout her career she has been commissioned by many international dance companies to create new pieces, including The Second Person (2007) for Netherlands Dans Theater and Emergence (2009) for the National Ballet of Canada, the latter of which was awarded four Dora Mavor Moore Awards.
The physically integrated dance movement is part of the disability culture movement, which recognizes and celebrates the first-person experience of disability, not as a medical model construct but as a social phenomenon, through artistic, literary, and other creative means.
Johannes Wieland is a choreographer, teacher and dancer.
Digital Performance is a very wide category filled with a range of productions. It is performance that incorporates and integrates computer technologies and techniques. Performers can incorporate multimedia into any type of production whether it is live on a theatre stage or in the street. Anything as small as video recordings or a visual image classifies the production as multimedia. When the key role in a performance is the technologies, it is considered a digital performance. This can be as little as projections on a screen in front of a live audience to creating and devising a performance in an online environment.
Ballet Pixelle is a ballet company founded in 2006 by choreographer Inarra Saarinen. Saarinen still serves as artistic director and choreographer. Ballet Pixelle is the first company to perform completely in virtual reality. Its goal is to explore and extend physical and virtual dance and movement and to blend those realities.
Lloyd Newson is a director, dancer and choreographer. He formed DV8 Physical Theatre and has led the company since its inception in 1986. He studied psychology and social work at Melbourne University and after graduating began his dancing career in New Zealand, initially as a dancer but later also as a choreographer.
Jasmin Vardimon is an Israeli-born, UK-based choreographer, dancer and artistic director of the Jasmin Vardimon Company, which she formed in 1998 in the UK. Vardimon is an associate artist at Sadler's Wells Theatre, since 2006.
Theatre Gargantua is a Toronto-based theatre company founded by Artistic Director Jacquie P.A. Thomas in 1992. The company emphasizes artist collaboration, both within Canada and globally, combining a range of artistic disciplines to create new work. The defining experimental style of Theatre Gargantua's productions are a hybrid of Thomas' studies in Europe, which include creation as an artistic collective, an extended development phase, imagistic production elements, original composition often performed live and choreographed physicality of performers. The topics of exploration in Gargantua's past shows have been grounded in social issues, creating compelling work that is presented through highly physical performances.
Stacy Makishi is a Hawaiian-born performance artist, physical theatre and live art specialist. Her work often involves combining autobiographical experience and comedy with inspiration from fictional sources, such as Hollywood movies or novels. She has been identified by The Guardian as part of a new generation of artists making 'innovative shows [. . .] with and by young people'.
