Creative Talk: Peter Oswald & Howard Gayton

This event is part of our Creative Talks series that feature practitioners/makers/artists who work in a variety of disciplines, media and forms across the creative arts, including: the visual arts, design, performance, craft-work, creative writing and more. The series aims to address questions about the nature of ‘creativity’ and ‘practice as research’, featuring speakers who will share their work, the processes they use, their influences, and their own experiences of professional practice. Sessions will reflect the disciplinary range of speakers and may feature presentations, performances, workshops etc. The aim is to create an open, multi-disciplinary space in which to introduce audiences (students and the public alike) to a wide range of creative practices that inspire new ideas about how to make new work.

For this Creative Talk we welcome Peter Oswald (writer and performer) and Howard Gayton (director, performer) to run a mix-moded workshop, demonstation, talk to demonstrate their practice in front of the live audience.

They will invite a select group of University of Plymouth students to participate in the workshop where the audience will witness the participants being invited to enter into a process of creating short pieces of physicalised text. The event will also include an introduction to Commedia by Howard, in which participants will realise a masked character. These characters will then interact in an improvised manner, to generate text which the participants will develop with the help of Peter. Then there will be a showing of the creations, and a chance for questions.

Howard Gayton was a founder member of the highly successful Commedia company Ophaboom, which he ran for seventeen years. He is a practitioner of Punch and Judy and studying at Exeter University, his PHD on the esoteric roots of fooling.

Peter Oswald was Writer in Residence at Shakespeare’s Globe, 1998-2005. His plays, in verse, have been performed there, at the NT, in the West End, on Broadway and around the world. He is currently Associate Writer at the Marylebone Theatre, London.

Chair: Ruth Way, Associate Professor Theatre & Performance, University of Plymouth

Image credit: Meg Hatters

Host or Publisher The Arts Institute