Theatre Beyond Words

Theatre Beyond Words is an exploration of how the Moment Work devising method may be utilized as an artistic tool to communicate ideas beyond the capacity of spoken text. In 1991 Moisés Kaufman and partner Jeffery LaHoste founded Tectonic Theater Project so they and their company members could explore the avant-garde theatre that fascinated them. Moment Work was born from the fusion of Mary Overlie’s View Points and Moisés Kaufman’s own explorative exercises with Tectonic Theater Project. My work is a hands-on investigation of the creative power of this technique through my application of Moment Work to the direction of my own emotionally charged project: Joseph Wallace’s Hush Little Celia Don’t Say a Word, produced by the University of South Dakota Student Theatre Cooperative. Through the production process, I explore how the Moment Work language of theatrical elements lends itself to deeper, more precise analysis in the creation process and how Moment Work cultivates the invention of forms capable of adequately expressing content that is difficult to communicate verbally