Adelaide Fringe Workshop: Nailing a Spoken Story with Emma Beech

About the masterclass:

Stories are an incredible source of material and connective juice between a performer and their audience. This masterclass will help you find the heart, hone in on the point, and tune the delivery, so your story can do what it needs to do - express, connect and delight.

This could be a story that is used as a part of or as the whole basis for a show, told as between set 'banter' or even used to 'pitch' a work. You can take stories from your life, the lives of others or even a story you have heard or read about - all of them can be crafted into telling power. 

After a couple of quick palate-cleansing games to get your minds ready to access, this masterclass will go full steam into your story crafting, from story - selection through to story delivery. Emma writes by improvised speaking, so she will also share her 'dot-point' writing style.

Get ready to work, talk and listen. 

Bring a note-book, a bottle of water and a story.

Experience level:

This masterclass is open to people who practice performance of any kind, who either want to build on a story-telling practice, or incorporate it into their own genre of practice. General public are welcome to attend yet will need to be ready for working within a theatrical environment with performing artists who are familiar with improvisation and responding to unknown creative tasks ie: written, verbal and physical.

About the facilitator:

I started making shows for my mum in her bedroom when I was six. Since then, I graduated from Flinders Drama Centre, worked in theatre and screen as well as developing an arts practice of making theatre shows from intimate conversations with other humans, from strangers to my dad, drawing from documentary to create my own docu-theatre style.  The best moments of these conversations I collect together to make shows, which exalt the un-exalted in our daily lives, and hone in on our life-changing stories.  My work is often direct address, and montages monologue storytelling, gestures and physical narratives that are collected from interviews, conversations, confessions and observations.

I work with collaborators that include installation-theatre companies in Demark and Singapore, and various companies / festivals locally including The Rabble, Arts House, DreamBIG festival, Aphids, OSCA, No Strings Attached, STC SA, Brink Productions and Vitalstatistix. Emma has just finished her one-woman show commissioned for the Adelaide Festival, The Photo Box.

Image: Peter Torr

Host or Publisher The Mill