H42.2760-001 Lec 4 Credits
Instructor(s): Paula Cole
Performance Workshop with East Coast Artists
Paula Cole
H42.2760-001 (Albert #74536)
Monday-Friday 6:00 – 11:00 pm, 4 points
Abe Burrows Theatre, 721 Broadway, 1st Floor
Limited Enrollment: This course requires an application to the instructor(s). Please prepare a one-page statement
outlining your interest and qualifications for enrolling in this course. Please submit statement to
noel.rodriguez@nyu.edu by June 6, 2008.
East Coast Artists’ training has been based on the principle that performers and directors can share a language of the body that
not only bonds the group through the creation of ensemble, but also provides specific tools for rehearsal and composition. An
important aspect of the work is concerned with the act of performance itself and with deep questions about self, identity and
one’s participation in groups. Based on training and performance techniques developed by Richard Schechner, daily practice includes rigorous yoga, breath
and vocal exercises, employs text and personal material, as well as movement and sound as points of initiation for composition.
Students work closely with East Coast Artists’ accomplished performers and directors to create solo performances and group
compositions.
A significant portion of the workshop is dedicated to the RasaBoxes™exercises, devised by Schechner. The exercises comprise
a psychophysical approach that begins with finding form for nine basic emotional-energetic archetypes through the use of body
and the breath. The work then leads to sound and movement exercises, relating to objects and others, language and text
exercises, and finally to scene work and the layering and scoring of rasas to create complex characters, to explore and compose
scenes, to create choreography and entire performances.
For more information, email: eca@nyu.edu.
Paula Murray Cole served as Co-Director of Education for East Coast Artists (ECA), Richard Schechner, Artistic Director, and instructed the
ECA Summer Workshop at NYU with colleague Michele Minnick from 1999 to 2005. She was the Program Coordinator and Instructor of ECA’s
Summer RasaBoxes Training Intensive at Ithaca College (2005-06) and at the Dell’ Arte International School for Physical Theatre in Blue Lake,
CA (2005-07). She has also conducted or co-taught RasaBoxes workshops at Dartmouth, Rutgers and Cornell and has presented the work at
conferences at Concordia University in Montreal (2000), Ege University in Izmir, Turkey (2003), the International PSi conference in Singapore
(2004), The International Society for Researchers on Emotion Conference (2004), and for the Association for Theatre Movement Educators
Colloquium (2005) and the American College Theatre Festival, Region II in Milwaukee, WI (2007). She has taught, directed or coached
productions at New York University, Hofstra University, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,
Interlochen National Arts Camp, Trollwood Performing Arts Camp, and the Governor's Magnet School for the Arts of Norfolk, Virginia.
Publications: “The Actor As Athlete of the Emotions”, by Michele Minnick and Paula Murray Cole in Movement For Actors, edited by
Nicole Potter, Allworth Press, 2002.
“Rasaesthetics”, by Richard Schechner with sidebars by Michele Minnick and Paula Murray Cole, TDR, Fall 2001, and Performance
Theory, Routledge, 2003.
