Thomas Haase, Texas U.S.A. 2023
Thomas Haase lives and works in El Paso, Texas. He is the Theatre Director at Americas High School and an Adjunct at El Paso Community College. He strives to develop a love of theatre in his students each year through classroom instruction and stage productions. Each year, over the course of his 26-year career in education, he has directed three to five productions ranging from one-act plays to musicals. He also serves as a judge for the University Interscholastic League for Theatrical Design. As the director of a large high school, he manages a five hundred-seat theatre that hosts both educational and community events.
A philosophy he often shares with his theatre students is, “The theatre artist absorbs, adapts, and grows from every experience and every environment. Theatre reflects and creates the world at large.” When he finds time, he works as a Divemaster and assists student divers in discovering the beauty of the underwater world.
Discovering Ritual Through Immersive Storytelling
Can you tell a story without using spoken, recognizable language? This workshop taps into challenging an individual’s desire to communicate without the use of conventional speech. Performers rely on their skills of expression using only gestures and unconventional sounds to develop a collective language used for one specific performance. Each group will collaborate in generating the details of the environment of a society that has not yet developed a nuanced spoken language. Groups will then use their setting to create a short performance that is culturally significant to their “new” society.
It is strongly encouraged that the “new” community is not based on a historical model, but instead encouraged to create an original society. Participants will end the workshop by performing their scene using only sound and gesture. They will leave the workshop having sharpened their skills of expressing and understanding non-verbal communication and how these skills can strengthen any performance.