Write - Move - Talk
Memoir & Movement
in studio with Sara Porter
Sept. 18, 2022 | 11am - 1pm
Orillia Opera House
$25 workshop fee
Description
Memoir & Movement is a dynamic, multi-disciplinary workshop for personal & professional exploration that draws on the uniqueness of each person's story and bodily experience.
Sara Porter leads participants through a lively series of movement improvisations, writing prompts, vocal explorations and drawing to generate various kinds of memoir material geared toward performance. Questions surrounding memory, identity, body history, storytelling, performance and craft are explored through creative work and conversation.
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Drawing on creative tools from dance, literature, and clown, Sara Porter leads a playful approach to exploring and expanding your personal creative terrain.
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You will gain fuller access to your breath and vocal range, refine your writing, extend your movement vocabulary, awaken your senses and imagination. Mine past & perspective for the movement, image, sensations and stories that tell you who we are. On stage and in life.
Each class includes:
Movement - to warm up the body and awaken the senses
Creative Writing - to collect images, record sensation and story
Voice - to bring text into action
Expand your imaginative scope, build multi-disciplinary modes of delivery, and integrate elements into performance. Choreographic structure blends with improvisation to present material at the end of class.
For creative people from all walks of life
Past Participants say...
"Surprisingly joyful!"
"Wonderful, generous and so beautifully creative."
"A truly inspiring teacher."
Explore your body of stories...
Artist Bio
Sara Porter is a multi-faceted artist, performer, writer and teacher with a distinctive voice and a broad palette. Noted for being truly multi-disciplinary – and her wry sense of humor – Porter centres her work in a feminist, queer worldview, and deals with the body as a point of personal reflection.
Porter’s signature one-woman show, Sara does a Solo (2017) - about the complex interplay of motherhood and dancing – toured across Canada, and to San Francisco and New York City, relaunching her performing career at the age of 47. It marks the beginning of her memoir-based works. Her subsequent solo work, Getting to know your Fruit (2019), took a direct and playful approach to the form of memoir itself, and Porter’s queerness, centering on her original poem about an apple, orange and banana in search of self-knowledge. Presented live at Toronto's International Presenters Showcase at Fall for Dance North International Festival (FFDN) in 2019, the work was re-envisioned as a film - by director William Yong - and premiered at FFDN in October 2021. Porter’s current work - L-E-A-K – both art exhibit and performance – is an absurdist and erotic love letter to the ocean. It premieres in Toronto in June 2022.
As a Chalmers Fellowship recipient in 2019, Porter began investigating the intersection of literary memoir & memoir, and developed a unique mode of training and artistic exploration incorporating voice, writing, moving and conversation. She teaches workshops to artists and community members across Canada and internationally. As a creative consultant, she works with circus, opera, theatre, and dance companies, including LookUp Theatre (Toronto), Femmes du Feu (Welland), Sinha Dance (Montreal), Propellor Dance (Ottawa), Dream Big Productions (Toronto). She is currently developing an auteur-ship development program for circus artists with TOHU in Montreal.
Sara has developed new curriculum and taught theory, technique and creative practice since 1996 in colleges and universities in Canada and Scotland.
Sara has been contributing dance writing to print and online publications in Canada and Scotland for 30 years. She is author of Peter in Process: Peter Boneham’s sixty years in dance, a biography of the Canadian icon.
Sara has received support from Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council, Scottish Arts Council, Nova Scotia Talent Trust.
Originally from Nova Scotia, Sara lived and worked in Montreal and Edinburgh, before settling in Toronto, where she resides with her three children.