CHRISSIE POULTER
Chrissie Poulter is a director, devisor and trainer.
A founder member of Jubilee Community Arts (now The Public)in 1974, Chrissie went on to teach at Birmingham University for 7 years (1979 – 86), leaving to be Drama Officer and later Deputy Director for Yorkshire Arts (funding agency for Yorkshire – now part of the English Arts Council).Returning to education as Head of Expressive Arts at Accrington and Rossendale College she came to Ireland in 1990 to take up her current post as lecturer in the School of Drama at Trinity College Dublin.
She was co-director and founder of Artslab(Ireland) (1997) an interdisciplinary, intercultural arts laboratory engaged in local/international collaborations. Projects took place around Ireland as well as in Poland, Greece, France, Italy, Spain and the UK.
Invited to advise the Northern Ireland Arts Council on the development of community arts in Belfast in 1979, Chrissie became increasingly involved in training community drama leaders around that city and it was for them that she wrote her first book, Playing The Game, a recipe book of theatre games (later published by MacMillans,1987, now Palgrave)
Since 2001 her focus has been on borders and disputed territories.
In 2001 and 2002 this centred on intra-lingual performance, created in response to performers’ engagement with text, landscape and mother-tongue. Two site-specific performance pieces were commissioned by and created at the Roy Hart Voice Centre in France.
In 2004 a similar “performance essay” was created and presented as part of Lille’s year as European city of Culture.
These projects evolved through a process of performed response to material - The Roy Hart work was inspired by Beckett, the Lille project by Frank McGuinness’ “Someone Who’ll Watch over me” and the story of Scheherazade.
In 2001/2/3 some of the artists from the Roy Hart project collaborated on a series of projects with young people in their respective homelands (Kerry, Enniskillen, Bera de Bidasoa (Navarre) and Toroella de Montgris (Catalunia). This also linked in with My Voice Theatre from Bushwick in the Bronx, (New York.)
During 2003/4/5 Chrissie was mentoring a pool of 30 actors/film-makers and painters designing and delivering a cross-border schools-exchange peace project in Ireland for Co-operation Ireland. The emphasis here has been on intra-art collaboration, actors working with visual artists (painters and film-makers).
During 2004/5 and into 2006/7 she developed a parallel project with the Stamsund International Theatre Festival and Teater Nor on the Lofoten Islands, off the coast of Norway. Her collaborator in this is visual artist Kate Buckley , who was a collaborative artist with Artslab in the 90s .
Since 2005 Chrissie has been developing work with Lizbeth Goodman’s SMARTlab since becoming involved on the project “Streets Called Home” commissioned by the UN World Summit Awards and performed in Tunisia at the 2005 Summit on the Information Society. Chrissie was local choreographer in Tunis, contributing director in Ireland and contributor of some of the video footage used in the final performance. Most recently, they have collaborated on a piece for Project Brand New at Project arts centre, March 08 and a developed version for the Science Gallery at Trinity College in April 08.
Chrissie is also involved in an ongoing collaboration with the musicians of Prey Trio which has produced performances in Kilrudderry Gardens and Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray, Siamsa Tire in Tralee and, in June this year , will create work for the Stamsund International Theatre Festival in the Lofoten Islands, Norway.
Chrissie’s earlier directing work in Ireland includes
. One Big Bed (Nell MCafferty) for Point Fields, Belfast;
. My Love, My Umberella (Kevin O’Connell) for Opera Theatre Company (OTC) - UK, Ireland and Germany
. New Composers Shorts for OTC (for whom she also led a week-long acting for opera singers workshop, funded by Gulbenkian);
. The Quest – a rural arts project linking nine villages in Co Down;
. Dockers (Martin Lynch)- expanded to include a cast of 0ver 30 and performed in the old docks in Belfast;
. a number of other youth and community shows both north and south of the border..
Her work centres on the application of theatre arts to non-theatre contexts … and vice versa…the application of what is learnt from such a process back into the world of professional theatre practice.
Chrissie is increasingly asked to apply her work to the public, private and voluntary sectors. She has been a senior manager, consultant, chair of numerous committees and was a member of the Northern Ireland Arts Council for 6 years in the 1990s. She has also served as a board member of IETM (Informal European Theatre Meeting), a network of over 400 theatre and dance producers/directors/programmers from 40 countries. She is currently on the boards of theatre, film and festival projects in Ireland and abroad.
