Stephen Atkins
Stephen Atkins, Doctoral Candidate (Queensland University of Technology, Creative Industries), MFA Theatre/Film (SFU), BFA Theatre, (SFU) has performed, taught and directed locally in Vancouver and internationally in England, China and Australia. His professional background includes performance, script development, directing, and technological development for new media. Other training includes intensives with training centres in Vancouver, New York, Los Angeles, London and Brisbane. At Capilano University, Stephen enjoys teaching Movement and Voice classes, Acting and Elements of Performance History.
As a theatre artist and performer trainer I am interested in the emergent. I feel that (re)production of scripted plays creates a materialist and instrumentalist understanding of what it means to be a performing artist. In my discipline I often fear we have succumbed to roles that are modeled on industrialised methods of production and that our training methods have become utilitarian in their goals. Other disciplines routinely go through these processes as well; and routinely undermine the ivory towers that may have been erected by approaching their work conceptually and from a theoretical shift. I feel that in the last 20 years theatre is starting to make its first confident steps away from naturalism and repesentationalism; territory well-explored by other disciplines in earlier decades. As I examine my own work I find myself looking to other disciplines for perspectives on how to continue this journey. I also see how theatre and performance can provide a perspective on other art forms, revealing art as an action, and process as having a logic that springs from action.
