Luke Murphy Workshop

Drawing on Luke Murphy’s experience as director of acclaimed dance theatre company Attic Projects (Volcano, 2023; Scorched Earth, 2025), alongside an extensive performance career with Punchdrunk, Ultima Vez and others, this workshop will explore methodologies and uses of movement within a theatrical context.

First, we will build tools to access the widest sphere of our physical reach in space and apply them to various purposes. Does movement change with purpose or is it just our experience that changes? Harnessing the potential inside forces of gravity, coil, momentum and drifting we will find efficiency of effort in our muscularity and build complex sequences to trick our balance and disorientate our expectations. After establishing our broadest physical availability we will challenge ourselves to apply our skills both new and old in unfamiliar physical, emotional and psychological directions. Using adaptations of Stanislavski systems to confront physical and emotional states we will examine the relationship between movement, purpose and meaning for both the performer and audience.

Embracing the creative process as a chaotic, vulnerable, fragile, violent, exciting, intimate and volatile experience; over the course of the workshop we will interrogate the fundamental conflicts of the theatre space:

• Friction between the performer and the content.

• Contradiction between the awareness of moving in space and the internalization needed to realise a character.

• Conflict of sound, action and imagery.

• Hostility between the controlled atmosphere of the theatre and the unbridled chaos of human nature.

The outcome might not be the objective but where we look at conflict we might find resolution.

RESEARCH WEEK

Following the workshop Luke will invite four performers to join him and company members for a paid five day R&D period for a new project, Ingenium. Research will involve the creation and development of movement, dramaturgical interrogation of the script and characters as written and exploration into staging and the integration of languages into a cohesive narrative and performance vocabulary.