Jeffrey Bracco
Jeffrey Bracco is a director, actor, playwright and teacher who has worked in the U.S. and Europe. He directed numerous productions, including his own play, ShakesPod at the Edinburgh Fringe, two world premieres in Paris and directs regularly in the San Francisco area. Mr. Bracco has written or co-written six produced plays, most recently Truce: A Christmas Wish From The Great War. His play The Futurists! won the 21st Annual New Works Festival at Long Beach Playhouse. He collaborated with choreographer David Popalisky on the dance-theatre work, Futurismo, at Santa Clara University where he teaches directing, acting and theatre history.
PRESENTATION OVERVIEW
A practical guide to how the avant-garde Italian Futurists continue to inspire creativity in theatre-making and theatre education today - interactive discussion/lecture/brief participation by the audience/video demonstration -
by Jeffrey Bracco - director, actor, playwright and teacher, Lecturer at Santa Clara University (USA).
We Are The Futurists!
PROGRAMME
December 17 - 21, 2015
International Conference "Theatre Between Tradition and Contemporaneity"Theatre - Dance - Music - Visual & Multimedia Art - Arts Administration - Performing Arts Training - Theatre Design & Technology
The final portion of the presentation will include practical ways to include ideas and techniques of the Italian Futurists into university level theatre curriculum and teaching techniques in courses such as Acting and Directing. The Futurists’ focus on speed and technology, as well as techniques of brevity and simultaneity, appeals to our current students who are of the “internet age.” If time permits, the audience will be able to participate in some of these techniques through acting in very brief sintesi plays written by the Futurists.
Participants are welcome to download the PDF materials on Futurism:
Scenes from We Are The Futurists! An original play
Futurismo: A Dance-Theatre Fusion
Organized by IUGTE in collaboration with "ArtUniverse"
The second section of the presentation will focus on how these performance elements from the historical work of Italian Futurists can be brought into the present through contemporary theatre-making. Jeffrey Bracco will share how Futurism has inspired the writing of a full-length play, as well as a dance-theatre creation performed recently at Santa Clara University. Jeffrey Bracco would like to share written samples as well as still and video projections during this section.
Besides advocating the embrace of speed and technology in their own time, the playwriting and performance techniques of the Futurists incorporated simultaneity, brevity, an a-logical arrangement of events and an eclectic mix of performance elements.
In that last few years as a lecturer at Santa Clara University in California, and prior to that as a teacher, director and playwright in Paris, France, Jeffrey Bracco's specialized area of interest has been the Italian Futurists, who were extremely influential in the worlds of art and performance pre and post First World War. They continue to influence artists today. Jeffrey Bracco has used their creative ideas as inspiration for his own work, especially as a playwright and educator, and he believes some of the techniques he has developed would be of interest to other artist-educators.
The first part of the presentation will be a brief historical overview of the work of the Italian Futurists – especially as it pertains to performance. Special attention will be paid to the continued relevance of their artistic concepts and how their innovative ideas anticipated our current technology-driven culture.
