This collaborative process will be facilitated by Obie and Bessie Award winning actress and choreographer, Laurie Carlos. The first week will be dedicated to exploration, collaboration, and creation under Laurie's guidance. The second week will focus on evolving the work and performance. At several venues in Maine, including Bowdoin College and Stonington Opera House, Laurie will be presented as a lecturing guest artist, and our work-in-progress will serve to demonstrate her approach to the creative process.

An Obie and Bessie award winning artist, Laurie Carlos is a powerhouse provocateur. An original player in the New York Avant-Garde Performance scene, Laurie has developed new characters and new aesthetics for the stage for over thirty years. She is a writer whose oft-anthologized pieces, including White Chocolate, The Cooking Show and Organdy Falsetto represent daring and successful forays into abstract aesthetics within late-twentieth century American Theatre. A gifted actress, she created the role of Lady In Blue in Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. An inventive, two-time Bessie Award-winning choreographer (for White Chocolate and Heat), her work with the Urban Bush Women is the stuff of performance legend. A unique director, she has helmed the premieres of new work by award-winning writers Sharon Bridgforth, Carl Hancock Rux, Luis Alfaro, Rebecca Rice and Daniel Alexander Jones.

Participants from the 2008 workshop raved:

"As a teacher/mentor, Laurie brings a fierce love and acute observation to the work. She knows and trusts the process which she has developed over years of creating work in this way. The experience is uncomfortable at times, but change is uncomfortable. If the student commits to the process, and trusts Laurie as a guide, the transformation is awe inspiring. I saw it in the other students. I experienced it in my bones. If you are a creating artist, take this class. You owe it to yourself!"

-Susan Poulin, Actress and writer

"The workshop totally redefined my work. Now I know that my work is not a product or an art form. My work is the process of being honest with myself, day to day and moment to moment. My work is the process of knowing what I'm experiencing . . . of repeatedly sacrificing the ego (the little me) so that I can serve what-I-love exclusively. This was one of the most exhilarating workshops I've ever taken."

-Karen Montanaro, Mime and dancer