Testimonials - A BIG thank you to all my artists

It’s been a hugely glorious time her at Kate Ellis Coaching and a whole bunch of my wonderful artists (and young artists guardians) have offered to reflect with these glorious testimonials.

From Acting School auditions, to getting their first ever agent.. to landing auditions for the new Bruce Springsteen film (with Jeremy Allen White), Mystery Road Origins, the newest offering from THE Phoebe Waller-Bridge, a role beside Florence Pugh and call backs for Heartbreak High season 3, Michael Jackson the Musical and Beetlejuice the musical.

F YEAH (if I do say so myself!).

Thank you to all my artists for offering these musings… and for your joy, bravery and talent. It’s a pleasure working with YOU all.

xxKate

COME PLAY at TAFTA!

We take our passions seriously. But we also act because it's fun, right? Research suggests that the more we play, the deeper connections we make between the learning and our entire bodies. In other words, through play we have a full-bodied experience. This is of course excellent for the field of acting.

Join Kate Ellis for three evenings at TAFTA to find nuance and colour in your audition pieces and work, through experimentation and play. Through Kate’s unique approach to scene work you will open up a multiverse of choices for any one scene, proffer unique auditions and have fun while doing it.

Kate has worked with international artists such as Lucy Fry, Aisha Dee and Connor Jessup as well as on International programs and with International
Production Companies such as ‘The Saddle Club’ and Temple Films (Anupam Sharma). She has worked on Australian Features such as ‘Judy and Punch’ and ‘That’s Not Me’ and with actors in such stage productions as Hamilton. She teaches at acting schools such as 16th Street Actors Studio & TAFTA in Melbourne/Naarm, Australia. She further supports artists and the broader community through her writing, participation in Q and A’s and through government initiatives with Drama Victoria. She recently spoke at the World Drama Education Congress in Iceland.

MPavillion. Transitioning for Survival.

On the 10th of February myself, Candy Bowers, Sarah Aiken and Lucienne Shanti gathered at the wonderful MPavillion to discuss …. What are the benefits of change? Why, and how, do we find it uncomfortable? How can we more openly approach it?

A further framework for the discussion was the provocation that ‘transitions are awkward’ (proposed by Damon Gameau in the documentary 2040) and the question, if we need to make a ton changes in order to survive as a species, how can we approach transitions with more grace, flow and even sensuality?

I gathered artists to speak on such matters as they are well-versed in vulnerability. Whether they act, paint, write, dance…, they reflect something of the human experience. Further, for those who move in their careers, like yoga teachers, transitions are a necessary part of life’s flow—you can’t make a position without a transition.

Listening back over the discussion (which will soon be available as a podcast on the MPavillion website), I am grateful to each speaker for talking so candidly about the more vulnerable of their experiences as humans well as how they cultivate discomfort in their professional fields. Process for instance is something all artists have to embody whilst creating works; and yogi’s ask us all to move through classes.

Sarah talked to her and Rebecca Jensen’s piece WAISTD - What am I supposed to do? which tackled our cultural inertia in the face of climate change by asking audience members to participate in almost every scene. She stated

‘The reason we keep doing participatory work is because it is so uncomfortable. It’s terrifying… But it’s so interesting because people have to make decisions all the time…'

This is perhaps what we need people to do more in the face of our climate crisis. At the time that we feel perhaps most crippled, most trembling and fearful, the most vulnerable, we need to be proactive. Sarah continued by reflecting on this tension through the process she and Rebecca underwent as they created WAISTD. For how do you

‘…play with the tension between holding ourselves accountable and the power hierarchies that exist in this conversation… Our individual roles matter to a certain extent but we need to look at the systematic and structural things that are really f’ing shit up’.

Candy reflected here on what it’s like to be literally excluded from the work she so passionately wanted to make because she didn’t, at the time of graduating from NIDA, ‘fit the demographic’. The transition between an industry and culture that said no and an artistic drive that said YES.

Here the conversation took an important twist for what could be possible if more perspectives and intelligences were included in the conversation about climate change and the survival of our species? This was in fact something I concluded the evening with - a provocation directed to the audience. Can we move a little from the ‘modern piety towards science’ and consider other voices? The Arts for instance embody creative thought, imagination and innovation. Isn’t that what we need right now? People who MOVE and people who think beyond?

Lucienne’s voice during the conversation when talking to the awkward part of the evenings conversation reflected on how important it is to ‘…allow ourselves to experience the whole spectrum of human experience. And vulnerability is one of them. And awkwardness is one of them. And fear is one of them. And discomfort is one of them. And if we decide to reject all those that we perceive as negative, there’s a lot of ourselves that we end up suppressing… so as soon as we allow ourselves to be in an awkward place… you’ll notice aspects and part of yourselves coming forth… which then becomes this beautiful thing like …what am I capable of? What can I do that I didn’t perceive I could. There’s a lot to know it NOT knowing’.

The conversation moved into discussions around the differing approaches we can take during periods of transition (could they be experienced in a more sensual way for instance???), as well as what KIND of survival we want to have. The desperate gripping kind or one that flourishes?

I am so very grateful to these women for their perspectives and intelligences, to all guests who joined us and to the MPavillion for providing such inclusive spaces for all to be able to attend and participate.

x Kate

International English Education Symposium

What a privilege to present and listen to a plethora of thought provoking humans at yesterdays International English Education Symposium at Monash University. Gathering academics and progressive teachers in the field of writing and English Education, the symposium titled ‘Write Now: teaching writing in high stakes times’ promoted focused, active dialogue among English educators from across Australia and internationally about the teaching of writing.

I spoke to my abstract ‘Ethical Hedonism: vitalising pleasure in writing processes’ and my work as both a writer and educator. Please see below:

ABSTRACT:

Pleasure is a dirty word; particularly if you gift wrap it the way modern consumerism does or deliver it with an assessment rubric as in the case of the Australian Education System. As teachers, we know the pained expressions our students give us when they turn the pages of their unit booklet to see their ‘end point’ – the boxes they must come to tick; and we too hunch our shoulders in this moment, recognising under fluorescent lights and amongst dead furniture that we will need to mark, grade and throw back to our students a ‘value’ for their ‘efforts’ over the ten-week course.

Though research states that a great deal of English teachers are not writers nor have participated in any creative writing workshops since they themselves were in High School, there is a necessity for us to consider what circumstances bring about pleasure if we are to get our students to find an appreciation for writing. Pleasure enough for instance, to incite in our students the same level of entertainment they delight in through cinema, gaming, books and the theatre for their own storytelling processes.

Pleasure here can become about elongated experiences of time… that curiously disappear simultaneously. The aforementioned ‘dead’ aesthetics of the very classroom we are asking our students to create in …can become a rich source of stimulus akin to Umberto Eco’s reflections on monsters and ‘the ugly’ in, On Beauty. So too can we nourish states of play, ‘prioritising movement or diversion’ to ‘lean towards the imaginative, sometimes the outright rebellious’ as our own Julienne van Loon writes in ‘The Thinking Woman’.

The trick here is of course to do our research and spend some time thinking on what brings us pleasure as much as what brings about states of rapture and gratification in our students. For me, as a writer, it is a 5am start, before neighbours wake; and a large A3 notebook with Copic Markers and a pen that seems to improve my handwriting. This I discovered the hard way, burning out in my 5th year of teaching noting that my arts practice had been swallowed by all the astounding array of negatives research and staff room banter backs up on the teaching profession. I have always been more creative in the morning and so I simply set my alarm for one hour earlier.

In this ritual, I recognised how beautiful my home was …in comparison to the spaces I taught in and wondered how we expected students to imagine when faced with blue tacked walls and stained white boards. As 5am suddenly became a frantic, ‘I should have left 20 minutes ago’ …I giggled on route to school that my time might fly …and that I might be the rebellious artist I want my students to become.

From here I have spent a great deal of time experimenting in class with writing processes that cultivate pleasure. I have delighted on many occasions since that, once pained expressions have transformed into states of revelatory shock… that the period is over. That they have been immersed in states of rapture and seen a different kind of light.