CREATING AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL & GENRE-PUSHING PERFORMANCE A WORKSHOP BY KRISHNA ISTHA

This workshop will be facilitated by Krishna Istha, Paula Varjack and Julia Croft, focusing on how they make work that stretches and pushes form, encouraging participants to create their own material.

Krishna Istha is a performance artist, comedian, theatre maker and screenwriter. Their performance practice is trans-disciplinary, creating socially conscious form-pushing works that speak to taboo or underrepresented experiences of gender, race and sexual politics. Currently, they are writing on Sex Education (Netflix), and is a Barbican Centre Open Lab artist (2021-22). More recently, they co-directed Jazz and Dice by Naked Productions for BBC Radio 4 and was an Arts Admin Bursary Artist (2020-21). As a screenwriter, Krishna has several original TV series in development with UK production companies.

Paula Varjack is an artist working in performance, video and participation. She makes work as a way of making sense of and communicating with the world. In every show she makes, she aims to find the balance between making audiences question themselves, and feeling like they have had a fun night out. She uses storytelling to take audiences on a journey, shining light on what some might find uncomfortable, or may not have contemplated before. She is a London Pleasance associate artist and a Barbican Open Lab artist. She has been commissioned to make work by The Barbican, Battersea Arts Centre, Camden People’s Theatre, Fuel, The Marlborough, Attenborough Centre for the Arts, Upstart Theatre, Beam, and First Draft Cabaret.

Julia Croft is a live artist and performance maker based in Auckland, New Zealand. Julia’s practice draws on feminist and queer theories to create performance works that explore representational politics, violence, the body and increasingly feminist futurisms and Queer world building. She has created 10 full length works including 3 solo works: If There’s Not Dancing at the Revolution, I’m Not Coming, Power Ballad and Working On My Night Moves the latter two with Nisha Madhan as director and co-creator. These works have toured extensively throughout NZ as well as Australia, the UK, Singapore and Canada, including to the Yard Theatre and Battersea Arts Centre. Working On My Night Moves was awarded a prestigious Total Theatre Award at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival as well as an Auckland Theatre Award for Excellence.

This show is part of Roundhouse PROCESS – a work-in-progress series interrogating artistic processes and artist care – part of the Roundhouse’s year-long theme of Liberation.