October 2009 Archives

Sheila teaches workshops and conducts residencies for students from grade 3 to graduate school and for professionals.

"Overall, this has been one of the best classes that I have taken at Duke! Sheila Kerrigan has created a class that holistically builds up each student and combines the arts, social issues/analysis, leadership, and personal/group development."

• Collaborative Creative Process for Performers
• Community-Based Performance; Where Art and Activism Intersect
• Community-Based Art for Social Change

For High School & College Students &Professionals:

For Adolescents

• Creating Original Performance

• Integrating Theatre Arts, English & Social Studies in Grades 4-8
• Creating a Cooperative Classroom Through Drama in Grades 4-8

"This was one of the most passion-filled, personable (or personally honoring) & pragmatic workshops/conferences I have attended."

For Teaching Artists:

• Integrating Your Art with the Curriculum

• Mime
• Juggling

• Collaborative Creative Process
• Mime

• Communicate! Cooperate! Mime!
• Mime & Poetry Writing
• Mime & Narrative Writing
• Exploring Figures from Local, State, or NationalHistory Through Drama

In November, 2009, Sheila team-taught a mime-and-writing residency for fourth graders at Winget Park Elementary in Charlotte, NC, through the ArtStart program. One teacher she worked with wrote:

"My students are adding more details to their written work. They are reading with more expression....My students were highly engaged in the activities..., I did not have any misbehaving in the class...I had 100% attendance during my artstart residency for the majority of the time."

If you work in a group to devise original performance, you need this book! Across the country, dance and theatre professors and teachers of community-based performance require it for their classes. It describes multiple approaches to the creative process, from how to come up with an idea for a performance, to how to create material, to how to organize and structure the material, and how to cut it. It also treats the collaborative process--paying attention to group process, creating group guidelines, communicating peacefully, managing conflict, and giving effective, rigorous peer critical response to work-in-progress.

"i am a free lance Mime and Actor, and want to tell you how much i LOVE your book. i have been creating devised work in recent years, and have gotten such great inspiration and concrete information from your writing."--Bill Bowers

Photo by Steve Clarke