Solo Performance Lab

Six week course open to graduating acting students
- BFA 4s and MFA 3s - only. The mission of the
Solo Performance Lab is to fuel students' creation
of multiple solo performance works that afford the
agency, fluency, and critical authorial skills
essential to contemporary artists. The Solo
Performance Lab compels actors to synthesize all
aspects of their training and is a launchpad into
the professional sphere.

Students will create two major pieces: one based
on a seminal dramatic text, and a second devised
piece derived from their personal experiences and
impulses. These works will be informed by 1) an
intensive study of exemplary contemporary
practitioners and of the multi-disciplinary
history of solo expression, and 2) an excavation
of their own identities, affinities, and personal
histories.

The course will cover a diverse array of practices
including theatre, standup comedy, drag,
vaudeville, cabaret, slapstick, spoken word,
performance art, podcast, social media,
photography, oratory, television, and film.
Figures studied, among others, may include
Kendrick Lamar, Samuel Beckett, Phoebe
Waller-Bridge, Fred Astaire, Anna Deveare Smith,
Cindy Sherman, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Nina Simone,
Marina Abromovic, Charlie Chaplin, Chantal
Akerman, Okwui Okpokwasili, Hannah Gadsby,
Spalding Gray, Tania Bruguera, Richard Pryor, Eve
Ensler, and Buddha.

Students will develop a vocabulary to discuss
elements of style and storytelling, and film and
edit their projects. Disciplines learned in other
classes (speech, voice, movement, text analysis,
etc.) over the course of their time at CalArts, as
well as the actor's creative instinct, passion,
and imagination are synthesized in the Solo
Performance Lab.