Professor Geoffrey Colman interviews Professor Anne Bogart for Exclusive Webinar with Digital Theatre+
On Thursday 9 January, Central and Digital Theatre+ hosted an exclusive webinar interview between Professor Geoffrey Colman and Professor Anne Bogart.
Professor Anne Bogart is one of the most significant international figures working in the US theatre today, and her work has shaped theatre scholarship for over four decades. She has developed a reputation as one of the most important and urgent voices working at the intersection of theatre practice and academia; she commands respect as both a scholar and teacher as well as a director internationally, and has been the recipient of major awards including Guggenheim, Doris Duke and Rockefeller Fellowships as well as receiving the Career Achievement Award from ATHE in 1999.
In 1992, Professor Bogart co-founded the SITI Company with Tadashi Suzuki and, building on this work as well as through her long teaching career, she has long insisted on the value of training and in-depth research as the basis of the theatre-maker’s art. She was one of the earliest American directors to insist on the importance of working across transnational practices and training.
During the 2018-19 academic year, Professor Bogart was a visiting Leverhulme Professor at Central, during which she delivered a series of Leverhulme Lectures examining 21st Century actor training, held workshops, participated in public In Conversations to discuss her work, and presented the key note speech at a special Leverhulme Conference held at the School in her honour (at which she also interviewed the renowned actor and director Fiona Shaw).
The webinar expanded on this work, allowing Professor Bogart to further examine the similarities and differences between actor and director training in the UK and USA, as well as to participate in an extended discussion about directing, teaching and writing about theatre. Webinar participants were also allowed an opportunity to ask Professor Bogart questions about her philosophy and practice.
Professor Bogart was interviewed by Central’s Head of Acting Professor Geoffrey Colman. Of the interview, Professor Colman said:
“Anne Bogart’s wisdom is perhaps only surpassed by her extraordinary curiosity. As an acknowledged leader in her field, she is never complacent, never accepts the received or ‘second-hand’ cultural perspective. It is as though she is hard-wired - not to mistrust the creative moment, but to demand of it something more, something better. Her reflections on acting, whether here at Central as part of the Leverhulme professorship, or in our recent Digital Theatre + broadcast, are some of the most intelligent, studio-experienced utterances about what it means to make or tell stories in the theatre. We have been blessed to have her here at Central with us. I am sure that her influence on actor training will continue to have great impact in the coming years.”
The webinar was filmed by Digital Theatre+, the world’s leading educational platform for the performing arts. Founded in 2009, Digital Theatre+ provides 3 million students in over 2,000 schools, colleges and universities across 65 countries with unlimited access to over 1000+ full length productions and education resources. They also collaborate with over 50 world-class theatre companies, industry associations, practitioners, teachers, examination boards and scholars to capture and curate live performance in stunning quality, bring an unprecedented range of insights from behind the scenes and commission bespoke educational resources to support study at every level. In 2018 Talia Rogers, the Publishing Director of Digital Theatre, was made an Honorary Fellow of Central. For more information on the work of Digital Theatre and Digital Theatre+ please visit their website. To view the full, exclusive webinar please follow this link.