Festival of Joy: Sharing of works in progress by the Chekhov Collective Community
Gretchen Egolf
Duck in the Window, a short play by Gretch Egolf. An absurd comedy based on real events. If end of life hallucinations are real events. Which they are.
Gretchen Egolf is an actor, director, teacher and secret writer (the cat’s out of the bag).
Katja Hilevaara
Mouth/Piece
Mouth/Piece is an audio performance inspired by an archaeological find of a 300-year-old skeleton of a young girl, excavated in 1968 in a cave in Poland. The girl was found with a skull of a chaffinch in her mouth. Mouth/Piece retells this story in multiple voices, including birdsong, speculating on ideas surrounding mother tongue, kinship and feminist ecology. What if the girl and the bird were learning to speak each other’s languages? What if they were exchanging knowledge across species? In the context of the ecological crisis we face, Mouth/Piece explores the relationship between the girl and the chaffinch as an example of the kind of biopolitical symbiosis we should perhaps strive for.
Katja Hilevaara is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and teacher who works in performance, installation, art-writing and facilitation. Ideas around maintenance and care are foregrounded in her work, and creative constraints such as ‘call and response’ instructions often shape her projects. She is currently developing an interspecies (bird-human) curatorial practice facilitating multi-voice conversation in domestic, ‘undisciplinary’ surroundings (see The Finch Girl and The Ridge Salon projects). Katja’s recent artworks and writing have drawn on (auto)biography and re-imagined histories, exploring ways to tell stories that question existing narratives which might deliberately mis-remember or otherwise creatively interpret events to shift their perspective and meaning. Katja is currently the Director of MA Performance Making at Goldsmiths University of London. www.katjahilevaara.com
You-Ri Yamanaka
My Body is a Human (working title)
You-Ri presents an extract from her new solo work, drawing on the practice of the Michael Chekhov Way, Butoh, and Kabuki dance.
Through movement and presence, the piece explores the human body as both intimate and cosmic — a living bridge between the inner and outer universe.
It may gently shift the way you perceive your own body in space.
You-Ri is an actor, movement director, intimacy coordinator, voiceover and acting coach. She was born in Japan and has lived in the UK for a long time.
She trained at LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art) and Lecoq (Phillipe Gaulier) in the UK after completing an MA in directing at the Drama department at Royal Holloway University of London, also in Kabuki dance (traditional Japanese dance) and Butoh (avant-garde Japanese dance) in Japan for over 25 years. She first encountered Michael Chekhov’s work in 2002 and has been integrating these practices into her creative work ever since.
You-Ri has also been exploring the meeting points between the East and the West to find the universal aspect in acting. She has taught at LAMDA, BADA, East 15, ALRA, ArtsEd, Rose Bruford, BADA, Fourth Monkey, The London Dramatic Academy in the UK, New National Theatre Drama Studio Tokyo Japan, Theater Fuusikaden, Gorch Brothers, Watanabe Musical School, Sophia University & Toyo University.
She has worked in theatre, film and TV as an actress in the U.K and her unique style deeply connected with the body has been much appreciated by many theatre companies such as: Royal Shakespeare Company, Watermill Theatre Newbury, dreamthinkspeak, Volcano Theatre, Theatre 503, Southwark Playhouse, New Earth Theatre, StoneCrabsTheatre, Dash Arts, amongst others and beyond the border of culture.
Movement Director/Coach/Choreographer and Director work includes: My Neighbour Totoro (Royal Shakespeare Company), Dido and Aeneas, Temple Middle Hall (Temple Festival), Magic Flute (New National Theatre Tokyo), Madam Butterfly (ENO) and Illyria (Theatre Royal Bath), Richard III / A Midsummer Night’s Dream (East 15), Crucible / Our Country’s Good (New National Theatre Tokyo, Drama Studio), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (NAHDA, Cairo, Egypt).
Also, her tailor-made workshop “Freeing the Inner Voice – Body and Expression” has been in consistent demand worldwide for many years.
Deborah Garvey
Deb Garvey presents three short original vocal compositions set to texts by the poets Shaun Gardiner and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Deb uses her skills as musician and actor to exploit a wide expressive vocal range. This culminates in a composition for voice and piano which blends both the spoken and sung voice. The arrangement to Gardiner’s poem is dedicated to Deb’s voice teacher Kristin Linklater and was written shortly after Linklater’s death in 2020. Perkins Gilman was an American activist for women’s rights at the turn of the twentieth century and the two short poems arranged by Deb capture both the frustrations and fragility of women.
Deborah Garvey is a voice coach who draws on her training and experience as a performer. Since 1995 she has taught singing in both conservatoire and non-vocational settings. She has a music degree and an MA in Voice Studies from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama where she was a Lecturer in Voice for nine years. During that time, she taught singing, voice and dialect across acting programmes and on the MFA Voice Studies programme. In 2019, she joined the voice team at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Deb is also a designated Linklater teacher and co-taught the first Linklater singing workshop at KLVC in Orkney in 2022. Other guest teaching includes The Globe and Young Vic Education departments, Academy of Dramatic Art, Zagreb and LMTA, Vilnius and, more recently. the MFA Linklater Teaching Practice (combining Michael Chekhov practice) programme. Deb has also presented papers at conferences with topics ranging from interconnections between spoken and sung voice to proposing new approaches to dialect work in actor training. She was recently voice and dialect coach on Yellowman at the Orange Tree, Richmond and singing coach on a major film for Sony Pictures to be released in 2023. She composes and continues to perform when teaching commitments allow. She is passionate about the potential of the human voice!