Theater
2025 Theater Workshop with Theodora Skipitares and Andrea Balis
Greek Chorus with Shadow Puppets
In Greek Theater the Chorus plays many roles, including illuminating the frailties of government, leadership and society. This will be an interdisciplinary workshop, where the participants will speak as well as create simple two-dimensional shadow figures, ending in a performance of their piece. The chorus can break through all the layers of the performance, warning characters of their doom but also preparing us, the audience of what’s to come. The chorus can be beautiful or terrible, or sometimes downright obscene but it occupies a shadowy world of its own, slipped between players and their fate, between the characters and the audience. In this workshop that shadow world will literally exist, between light and dark, and character and observer by using shadow puppets, which the workshop participants will make and with which they will then perform, with puppets and voices and create a special, theatrical space. All materials will be provided.
Theodora Skipitares is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and theater director based in New York. Trained as a sculptor and designer, she is the author/director of 30 performance works, each featuring documentary texts, original music, video, and as many as 300 puppet figures. She is a resident artist at La MaMa Theater. Ms. Skipitares has worked and taught master classes in Greece, India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, Iran, Brazil and Colombia. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Fellowship and a McKnight Playwriting Fellowship, among others. Her studio residencies include Sundance, MacDowell Colony, Bellagio, the Edward Albee Foundation, the BAU Institute and Bogliasco. Her visual work has been exhibited widely in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, most recently at the Whitney Museum. Ms. Skipitares is a Professor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
Andrea Balis has worked as a theater director and playwright and written young adult fiction and non-fiction. She has done many projects with Theodora for several decades, including a workshop together in Iran, in 2016 in which a group of Iranian women developed a play out of their own lives. After earning a PHD in history, she was a professor at the City University of New York for more than thirty years. She and Elizabeth Levy have written two well received books on 20th century political history for young adults. Bringing Down a President The Watergate scandal, and Witch Hunt: The Cold War, Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare.
What to bring or wear:
Comfortable clothes. Materials for shadow puppets will be provided.