News & Updates

UPCOMING: 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 is an intermedia performance in which a contemporary scientist named Mary Shelley discovers that one of her failed genetic experiments is running amok in her laboratory, at the same time as the novel Frankenstein is haunting her imagination. Using layered digital projections, brain imaging, and a virtual creature interacting with a live human actor, Reading Frankenstein examines the ethical repercussions of scientific research from the creature’s point of view. Given the autonomy of A.I. and the accelerating scientific possibilities of CRISPR, Reading Frankenstein presents questions about ethics and evolution in an era of genetic possibility.

Premiere performances in the Experimental Media Performance Lab (xMPL); UC Irvine
October 31st- November 10th

NEW: CounterBalance Trailer

excerpts from Mad Madge, She, Longitude, Elsewhere, The Iliad, and Jane Eyre

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.