In 2019, Boston Court Pasadena is pleased to launch two educational offerings for professionals, continuing our commitment to development of artists and new work. Class size is limited, so early registration is encouraged. Check back throughout the year, as additional classes or workshops may be added.
FROM GENESIS TO PERFORMANCE: WRITING AS INTERACTION
Taught by Emilie Beck and Leslie Blanco
Saturday, February 9, 2019
10am to 3pm
Cost $125
Limited to 12 participants
This is a two-part workshop. The first half of the workshop day will intersperse meditation, mindful movement, and generative writing exercises. We’ll be looking for ways to write freely, embrace the excitement of not knowing what will arise, release ourselves from judgment, and access unbound creativity. The second half of the class will be dedicated to sharing our work with confidence. We’ll play games to loosen ourselves from the constraints of stage fright, learn physical tools to support body and voice, and practice methods of delivery in order to speak our own words with fearlessness.
This workshop is geared toward writers of fiction and non-fiction prose, as well as poets.
WRITING BEYOND EXPECTATIONS
Taught by Emilie Beck
Registration is now closed for this class.
Mondays: 7 to 10 pm
January 7 through March 25
(No class on January 21 or February 18)
Cost: $500
Limited to 10 participants
At Boston Court, we look for plays that break expectations in some way. Maybe it’s as simple as not having a fourth wall, or following a non-linear timeline. Sometimes language is more poetic than realistic. At its most extreme, a play may take a metaphor and make it literal, upending associations with naturalism. We love plays that know the rules and break them intentionally, plays in which form and content equal one other in a thoughtful dance. In this 10-week course, we’ll assume you already know how to write a play. We’ll go beyond the basics of dramatic structure and creation of character, and look to create work in which we break form in pursuit of a more visceral, more imagistic, more theatrical version of a script.
THE INSTRUCTORS
Emilie Beck is the Literary Manager at Boston Court Pasadena, where she directed Cassiopeia by David Wiener, Shiv by Aditi Kapil, as well as numerous workshops and readings. She will be directing the upcoming How the Light Gets In by E.M. Lewis in 2019. Other directing credits include Miss Keller Has No Second Book at Gulfshore Playhouse in Florida, Block Nine at the Elephant Theatre, and Because They Have No Words at the Lounge Theatre in Los Angeles and the Piven Theatre Workshop in Chicago, among others. Her productions have received Ovation, Joseph Jefferson, and L.A. Weekly awards. Also a playwright, her plays include Number of People, Sovereign Body, And Let the Skies Fall, and Habeas Corpus. At Boston Court, Emilie has served as Dramaturg for The Children, Heavier Than, Alcestis, RII, Everything You Touch, The House in Scarsdale, and Everything That Never Happened, and she curates and produces the annual New Play Reading Festival. Her fiction and non-fiction writing has been published in Colorado Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, online in Howlround and LA Stage, and forthcoming in Waxwing. She has been a guest lecturer at the UC Riverside MFA in Writing Program, a guest speaker in USC’s Professional Writing Program, and will be teaching at Cal Poly Pomona in 2019. She has taught acting classes in scene study and viewpoints, and writing classes in structure, dialogue, and criticism. Her degrees are from Northwestern University (B.S. in Performance Studies) and Warren Wilson Program for Writers (M.F.A. in Fiction).
Leslie Blanco has been meditating for twenty-four years and has been writing fiction for even longer. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, PANK, TransAtlantic Panorama, and The Coachella Review, among others. She has taught creative writing and screenwriting at Lemoyne College, Syracuse University, the Syracuse YMCA’s Downtown Writer’s Center as well other private venues in New York and California. Leslie has meditated with yogis in many different traditions and also with Zen Buddhists. For the last few years she has studied Tibetan Buddhism at Shambala Meditation Center, and recently completed a five-part series on Contemplative Art, with a strong focus on the connection between creativity and meditation. She has an MFA from Warren Wilson College.
