News & Updates

REPORT: Performance Fall 2019

Reading Frankenstein 2019:
a collaboration between theater director/adapter Annie Loui, media artist and writer Antoinette LaFarge and neurobiologist Jim Fallon

Reading Frankenstein 2019played to capacity audiences Oct 31- Nov 10 in the Experimental Theater Lab (xMPL), UC Irvine, and was featured at the Society for Literature Science and the Arts (SLSA), and at the launch of the UCI Brain Initiative.

“CRISPr is essentially a toolkit that makes editing genes both faster and more precise,” explains LaFarge. “For our piece, we thought about it as a way to greatly speed up evolution and bring into being life forms of kinds that had never yet appeared on Earth—for better or for worse. And CRISPr has appeared at precisely the moment in history that climate change is exerting enormous pressure on life all over Earth—pushing many species that can’t evolve rapidly enough toward extinction.” OC Weekly

Watch for 2020 performances of Reading Frankenstein in Europe.

CounterBalance Theater’s “Reading Frankenstein” Trailer
Running Time 58 sec
“The task that was mine, I pass to you”

See more under PRODUCTIONS.

UPCOMING: Workshop Performance Spring 2020

Gilgamesh
One thousand years before Homer wrote the Iliad, the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia produced the epic story of Gilgamesh. It’s hero was a historical king who reigned in the Mesopotamian city of Uruk in about 2750 BC. In the epic, he has an intimate friend, Enkidu, a wild naked man who has been civilized through the erotic arts of a temple priestess. With him Gilgamesh travels to forbidden lands, battles monsters, and provokes the supreme goddess, Ishtar. When Enkidu dies Gilgamesh is inconsolable and sets out on a desperate journey to find the one man who can tell him how to escape death.

Counterbalance uses a translation by Stephen Mitchell (source translator of Counterbalance productions of the Iliad and the Odyssey) in our workshop adaptation spring 2020 in the Grotowski Barn. Watch for updates!

RECENT RELEASE by Routledge Press

2nd Edition
The Physical Actor
Contact Improvisation from Studio to Stage

by Annie Loui, Artistic Director CounterBalance Theater

Forward by Steve Paxton and a new chapter on Devising using CounterBalance tools. See details under: TRAINING

The Physical Actor is a comprehensive book of exercises for actors. It is carefully designed for the development of a strong and flexible body able to move with ease through space and interact instinctively on-stage. Annie Loui draws on her training with Etienne Decroux, Carolyn Carlson, and Jerzy Grotowski to bring Contact Improvisation into the theatrical sphere. She explains how it can be used to develop alert and embodied listening skills in the actor, and how to apply it to working with texts on stage. New for this edition are additional partnering exercises, in-depth applications of contact improvisation to monologues andscenes, and a chapter on devising physical theatre performances.