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Cass Tunick is a performer, teacher, and writer. Raised in Northern California she arrived to theater in her early twenties by way of dance. Originally trained in judo, gymnastics, ballet and modern technique she began an intensive practice in Action Theater with Ruth Zaporah in 1991 which determined the course of her life. Since then she has been improvising and creating original physical theater work on stages from San Francisco to Estonia. Fascination with language led to an MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University, a small Buddhist college. In 1999 she joined Shinichi Iova-Koga's inkBoat and the resonance with Butoh dance fully launched her into a starkly imagistic theater-making that corresponded to an ongoing delight in the surreal, darker worlds of fairytale, myth, embodied non-ordinary reality, and the profoundly mysterious nature of being.

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Photo: Lowell Brown

Since moving to New York in 2004, her solo performance practice continues to be constantly enriched by collaborations with these wondrous artists (past & present): Tanya Calamoneri & Company SoGoNo, composer Keren Rosenbaum's Reflex Ensemble and the founding of the Active Listening Playground (ALP), Shinichi Iova-Koga, Sarah Hickler, Olivier Besson, the Action Theater Ensemble, video artist David Finkelstein, Sten Rudstrom, Sabine von der Tann, Leigh Evans, Katie Yates, Max Regan, Sensei Charles Colten, Elaine Buckholtz, Peter Littlefield, and Etiquette with Marielle Hare and Linda Carr. She has danced for Tracey Rhoades' Exploding Roses, played keyboards for the band The Mad Scene, and contributed vocals to Barbez. She performs in the company she founded: Second Nature (with musician Danny Tunick and long-time colleague Heather Harpham). She teamed up with Abby Bender to create a two-woman show, Totally Other, a dance-theater work examining fluidity of identity and imagination, and since then they have created numerous smaller works. Her teaching and performance practices inform and re-invigorate each other.

 

Cass is a senior teacher, certifying instructor, and lineage-holder of Ruth Zaporah’s Action Theater and has devoted herself to the practice and development of improvisation for the last 35 years. She works closely with Ruth to envision and ensure the future of Action Theater and its organization.

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ABOUT

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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.

RESOURCES

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