Cass Tunick is a performer, teacher, writer and improviser who creates original physical theater work both nationally and internationally. Her intensive apprenticeship in Action Theater Improvisation with Ruth Zaporah began in 1991, and this ongoing depth/body practice linking presence, perception and the composition of reality determined the course of her life. Raised in Northern California, early studies included Judo, gymnastics, ballet and modern dance and eventually led to understanding the expressive intelligence of the body as an art form and a way of being. Action Theater and investigations into the improvisatory landscape exposed levels of play/being/mind so layered and sophisticated that it would take a lifetime to
Photo: Lowell Brown
acheive mastery. To expand an intimacy with language that could match the voice of the body and movement, she earned an MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University, a small Buddhist college. In 1999 she became a member of Shinichi Iova-Koga's inkBoat and continues to collaborate within resonances of Butoh dance, ritual, poetry, and surreal non-linear imagistic theater and meaning-making. She finds that the mythic world, embodied non-ordinary reality, and the profoundly mysterious nature of being are her best guides in both improvisation and the daily world.
Cass’s solo performance practice continues to be enriched by collaborations with these inter/trans/disciplinary artists (past & present): Keren Rosenbaum's Reflex Ensemble and Active Listening Playground (ALP), Etiquette with Marielle Hare and Linda Carr, Tanya Calamoneri & Company SoGoNo, Shinichi Iova-Koga, the Action Theater Ensemble, David Finkelstein, Sten Rudstrom, Sabine von der Tann, Leigh Evans, Katie Yates, Max Regan, Sensei Charles Colten, Elaine Buckholtz, Sarah Hickler, Olivier Besson & Moment’s Notice, and Peter Littlefield. Cass founded the company Second Nature where she performs with musician Danny Tunick and long-time colleague Heather Harpham. She and Abby Bender teamed up to create a two-woman show, Totally Other, a dance-theater work examining fluidity of identity and imagination, and since then have created numerous smaller works. Her performance practices inform and re-invigorate her 30+year teaching practice.
Cass is the co-director, senior teacher, certifying instructor, and lineage-holder of Ruth Zaporah’s Action Theater (a process that encompasses the organic outgrowth of Ruth’s radical theater improvisations and movement innovations) and has devoted herself to the practice and development of improvisation for the last 37 years. She worked closely with Ruth to envision and ensure the future of Action Theater and its organization.
Currently Cass teaches a 3-week intensive annually at the Notafe Festival in Estonia. She served as a full-time faculty member/Artist-In-Residence at Emerson College from 2015 to 2022. Her teaching has included appointments, master classes and workshops at numerous universities, performance programs, and local communities, as well as serving in the roles of choreographer, performance coach, and director for individuals and ensembles.
ABOUT
Action Theater is a training system in physical theater improvisation that builds vocal, verbal, and physical performance skills, hones awareness and increases expressive range. Action Theater uses embodied presence as a doorway into the agility of a vast imagination. The exercises incorporated are simple, playful and challenging and work on a deep level to expand moment-to-moment awareness and its relationship to both action and being. How do we fully experience how we are? The distracting power of judgement and fear is calmed as one's curiosity and compassion for the smallest moment is roused, however lovely or terrifying it might be. Central elements to the practice include listening, composition, musicality, alignment between form and feeling, the beauty of lost detail, the inhabiting of mercurial energies, and a way of relaxing into the active nature of time and change with eloquence, precision, and passion. While operating as a performance practice, these investigations speak to people from all walks of life.
ABOUT ACTION THEATER
Photo: Danny Tunick
Introduced to the arts of improvisation and Action Theater in 1990, I began intensive study with the brilliant theater innovator Ruth Zaporah in 1991, continuing through to present day. Ruth is the originator of Action Theater, and is continually evolving its form, philosophy and embodiment in the realms of physical performance. It is an honor to be a lineage-holder, senior and certifying teacher within this beautiful and powerful practice.
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Action Theater books by Ruth Zaporah are available on Amazon.com and in bookstores. For more information, articles, videos, and all things Action Theater related, go to www.actiontheater.com.
Ruth worked closely with writing coach and editor Sten Rudstrom on The Improvisation of Presence, and Cass Tunick on Improvisation on the Edge.
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