The Summer Institute is a free one-week theater camp for 12 to 17 year-old Columbia County public school students. Participants study movement, voice, acting, script-writing, and other aspects of performance. The focus is on creative play, fun, and collaboration.
Students work closely with professional actors and directors to create an original performance. Students do not need to have any experience with theater or acting, just the ability to show up on time every day and a willingness to participate in all activities, including a public performance. Free lunch is provided. If transportation is an issue we will offer assistance.
WORKSHOPS
Monday, August 9: 10 am–3 pm
Tuesday, August 10: 10 am – 3 pm
Wednesday, August 11: 10 am–3 pm
Thursday, August 12: 10 am–3 pm
REHEARSALS AND PUBLIC PERFORMANCES
Friday August 13: 10 am–3:30 pm, with an invited open rehearsal at 2 pm
Saturday, August 14: 12 pm–3:30 pm, with a public showing at 2 pm
Sunday, August 15: 12 pm–3:30 pm, with a public showing at 2 pm
The Wooster Group is a company of artists who make work for theater, dance, and media. We are based in New York City at The Performing Garage at 33 Wooster Street, where we develop and perform our work. We also perform our work at larger theaters in New York (Baryshnikov Arts Center, St. Ann’s Warehouse, the Public Theater). Our productions tour nationally and internationally. The Summer Institute was founded in 1996 at The Performing Garage by founding Wooster Group member Kate Valk, and Wooster Group associate Ariana Smart Truman.
Artist Biographies
Kate Valk is an actress working in experimental theater productions. For over thirty years, she has been performing internationally in roles she has created with The Wooster Group. Valk joined The Wooster Group in 1979, assisting the group’s director Elizabeth LeCompte on everything from making props and costumes to transcribing and editing texts. Since 1981 she has had a formative role in the creation of 25 full Wooster Group theater productions. Valk’s many awards include an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence in Performance (1998) and a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie,” Award for Outstanding Performing with The Wooster Group (2002). Valk attended New York University’s Tisch School for the Arts and studied with Stella Adler.
Ariana Smart Truman has been a leading force for 20-plus years in the field of Creative Producers, theatrical producers who position the artist’s voice at the center of process. A commitment to social justice is at the heart of her professional practice; she resists inequity in art-making and arts education. Truman served as the Producing Director for the award-winning theater ensemble Elevator Repair Service from 2003 to 2020, producing all the company’s work, spanning over 75 engagements worldwide and Off-Broadway. As a producer and fundraiser she has collaborated with many of NYC’s most acclaimed experimental performing artists, ensembles and institutions. She teaches workshops on producing theater, and is a frequent guest lecturer, most recently at Yale School of Drama, Brooklyn College, NYU Abu Dhabi, and NYU. She has been teaching experimental performance practice to school-age children since 1994, and it is the most rewarding and exciting thing she does.
Christopher-Rashee Stevenson is a theater artist from Baltimore. A current SUITE/SPACE (‘20-’21) artist at Mabou Mines and an alum of Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab ’18, his work as director and performer has been featured at The Performing Garage, The Tank, JACK, HERE Arts Center, The Actor’s Studio, American Repertory Theater, Millennium Film Workshop, Lincoln Center Education, LaMaMa, and the Eubie Blake Jazz Institute. He is currently working with Elevator Repair Service on their new piece Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge, and on a post-COVID chamber version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, as well as an Afro-futurist mash-up on the vampire genre using everything from Stoker’s Dracula, Bill Gunn’s Ganja and Hess to Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling, a piece on blood and survival.
