Making Work From Lived Experience: Exploring Grief & Loss

This workshop invites participants to explore how our lived experiences can become a starting point for making theatre. Through playful, practical and reflective exercises, we’ll explore ways of transforming personal memories, feelings, stories and fragments of experience into creative material for performance.
With a particular focus on grief and loss, we’ll consider how these experiences might be explored through the body, voice, movement, writing & text, and in the compositions we create.
We’ll look at how we can shape, fictionalise and transform lived experience.
This is a theatre-making workshop, not a therapy session. I am not a therapist or counsellor, and the workshop is not intended to provide therapeutic support. We will approach grief and loss through a creative and artistic lens, with care and respect for individual boundaries. There is no expectation to share anything that you don’t want to, and you are always free to step back from an exercise or work from imagination, observation or fictional material instead.
The workshop is open to different levels of experience.
Come ready to play, experiment, reflect and make.
About the facilitator
Kat is an actor, writer, director and theatre maker with over 20 years’ experience across theatre, film, television and creative projects. She has worked extensively with Punchdrunk as a performer, and creative collaborator and is a founding collaborator and co-Artistic Director of Gideon Reeling Theatre Company, where she has created, directed, written, produced and performed in a wide range of immersive and interactive work.
Alongside her creative career, Kat regularly facilitates workshops for professional artists, students and young people, specialising in areas such as devising, performance, immersive and interactive storytelling and acting for screen.
This workshop is part of an Arts Council-funded project surrounding STARDUST Starring Star Dust (In Person), a comedy, clown, cabaret, theatre show Kat has been developing that was born out of personal grief.
Photographer: Joe Twigg