In this role-playing workshop, based on Alan’s solo performance Share my Coffin, we imagine and enact the idea that one is in their own coffin being not ready (unprepared) for death and departure, with things left unsaid or yet to say, conversations yet unfinished, feedback not heard.
In their respective roles, workshop participants will take turns to lie in a simple coffin and speak with those gathered around who witness and support them by taking on significant roles, listening and/or responding as stand-ins, representing those with whom there may be unfinished business and issues.
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.
b. 1952