In this semi-ritual /semi-performance workshop Alan will lead participants through a process of group invocation, where all participants will simultaneously invite and invoke a deceased relative, significant other or friend, to become present to a gathering within the room. In other words the room will become doubled, populated with the living and the imagined spirits.
In this gathering participants will each, and collectively, attempt to create/ generate suitable sounds, utterances, laments that form a conversation of the unsayable between the dead and the living. To mourn, resolve, greet, allow a flow to the present, to incorporate.
In this workshop, Alan will be assisted by WeiZen Ho.
Alan Schacher is a contemporary performance-maker: a director, choreographer, designer, performer and installation artist, whose focus is on spatial experience and bodily mediation. An undercurrent of cultural landscapes and diasporic references, both imagined and inherited, form significant motifs in his work. He has developed an architectural approach to the interpretation of sites and use of materials which is carried through in ensemble performance, solo dance, video, installation and performance art. The body is a primary means and reference point in his work, which also employs large sets and spatial manipulation to realise projects, most of which involve a major collaboration by an artistic team.
With over 25 years experience, he was the founder of the Performance Ensemble Gravity Feed (1992-2004) he conceived and designed most of the company’s works and performed in them all. He also formed G.R.I. in 2000 and this is his current production company. As a dancer he was influenced by the methods of Butoh dancer Min Tanaka, with whom Alan trained and performed in Japanfrom 1989-91. Alan was recipient of the NSW Helpmann Scholarship for Dance in 1994, and completed an MFA at the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW in 2000. He lives in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.