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RVML Resource Center 2002-2007 Calendar Archives 29 July 2003, Tuesday |
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Lecture: Sacred Theatre: A Journey into the Spiritual Heart of Theatre by Bill Ritch
Time: 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: RVML Event Center - 258 A St, Ashland
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Sacred Theatre: A Journey into the Spiritual Heart of Theatre
By Bill Ritch
Lecture presentation with
break and Q&A period.
All Tuesday evening events
at RVML are Free Admission!
Presentation Description:
Bill Ritch, artistic director of Ashland's Theatre of the Heart, went on a pilgrimage in the summer in 2001 to Greece and Bali in search of the roots of sacred theatre. What he found was the ecstatic dances of Dionysus and Shiva, the healing ritual theatre of shamans, the embodiment of supernatural presence through total theatre and the "theatre of ecstasy" of Frenchman Antonin Artaud.
In this lecture Bill will be sharing his discoveries and how he feels that theatre can address the "crisis of disenchantment" in America. He will explain why he feels that actors are messengers of the gods; mystics called to awaken their audiences to the spiritual interconnection of all life, called to inspire their audiences to dance to the "music of the spheres."
Bill founded Theatre of the Heart, a sacred theatre company, in 1995 while living in the Findhorn spiritual community in Scotland. His life journey to the world of sacred theatre included four years of Waldorf school teaching and a year's study of spirituality at Matthew Fox's Institute of Culture and Creation Spirituality. While at Findhorn he taught sacred theatre as a path of personal transformation and performed one-person plays about environmental mystic John Muir at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
When Bill returned to America in 1997 he performed his Muir play Off Off Broadway and spent a summer at the Omega Institute conducting a weekly life coaching workshop for staff members. He then moved to California to teach theatre as a way of "soul healing" to prisoners in maximum-security prisons. Bill then took two years to study sacred and physical theatre at the University of California-Davis before moving here to Ashland last fall.
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 Licensed To: RVML |
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