Open Call | Virtual Workspaces by Toshiki Okada
How imaginations work
A series of workshops under the general title Virtual Workspaces, become a symbolic, virtual workspace for artists to communicate.
True to its mission to forge links with important institutions beyond Greece’s geographical borders, to support the professionalization of younger artists and to offer opportunities of connections within the international artistic community, Onassis Stegi is co-organizing the project Virtual Workspaces.
Artists from diverse artistic backgrounds, maintaining a transdisciplinary approach to their practice, offer the opportunity of a creative working space, involving a group of professionals from various backgrounds.
Embracing the digital shift that we are experiencing, this series of online workspaces is to be seen as an area that aims to bolster cultural fermentation, to encourage creativity and to build constructive exchanges in relation to specific goals and problematics. It will strive to maintain interactive processes within this safe-space of a temporary, but so valuable virtual framework of a selected group of peers.
Each Virtual Workspaces workshop is designed to foster the circulation of ideas between professionals, very often also involving non-professionals, with the hope to provoke sustained engagement within each group, and nurture the potentiality of new collaborations beyond the frame of the digital environment.
We hope that Virtual Workspaces will prove especially useful in times of upheaval and uncertainty, and offer comfort when things feel out of control.
How imaginations work
By theater director Toshiki Okada:
“I always put great emphasis on imagination while creating performances. Why? One reason is that I believe the actors’ imagination can be seen by audiences; in other words, to experience theater is to relate to the actors’ imagination. It is almost the same thing, at least for me. And another important reason is that I view imagination as a kind of choreographer. I trust it a lot in this sense. I know that imagination is very often wonderful at finding crazy movements you cannot get to when thinking theoretically. I always ask actors to have as many interesting imaginative ideas as possible and to develop them. And I tell them to ask their imagination to make them move.
I’d like to share these kinds of ways and ideas with you. We are going to start by observing how you can be affected by your imagination, or how it moves your body through certain workshops. And we are eventually going to try and build fictional imaginations, such as when you are given some lines to say, trying to develop your imagination to make movements more interesting.”
The workspace will be recorded and result possibly in a public show of selected fragments from these recordings.
Dates: 5, 8, 12, 15 October 2020
Time: 2:00pm Central European time (GMT+2) / 3:00pm Eastern European time (GMT+3)
Duration: 2 hours for each meeting
Place: ZOOM
The workshop is free of charge.
A group of participants will be selected to take part in the workshops, as well as a separate group which will be able to observe the whole process. Persons chosen to take part will be notified by Monday, 27 September 2020
Language: English
Organizers:
Onassis StegiCo-ordinators:
for STUDIO teatrgaleria: Anna Lewanowicz (Initiator and Head of the Project)
for Onassis Stegi: Christina Liata
