Workshops
Self-Scripting through the Moving Image
Ages 18 and up
April 5–26, 2023
6–8pm EST, Wednesdays
Image by Yara Travieso
Instructor
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo
Pricing
$160
Dates
5–26 April
Self-Scripting through the Moving Image focuses on the development of original film-works based on the students’ relationship to personal memory and history. This self-scripting workshop integrates DIY Filmmaking, performance-making devices, and intermittent writing, bridging the physical body and its relationship to text and moving image. At the core of this course lies a true spirit of introspective inquiry and experimentation, where mentorship is catered specifically to what the students' thematic, performative and aesthetic interests are. Balancing technique and improvisation, this hands-on-production course will teach students basic skills in filming, composition and editing. These techniques will be coupled with short screenings of filmworks by filmmakers and artists who engage with distinct political, social and geographical landscapes through personal memory. A DIY approach towards moving image making will invite students to use the devices they have at their reach to make short 2-3 minute films. Students will depart with basic knowledge of cinematic tools and conceptual frameworks that will familiarize them with an intuitive and personal filmmaking process.
This class will be held in-person at the Abrons Arts Center.
About Natalia Lassalle-Morillo
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo (B. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico) is a visual artist, filmmaker, theater artist, performer and educator whose work reconstructs history through a transdisciplinary approach to research, form and narrative. Melding theatrical performance, intuitive experimental ethnography, and collaborations with non-professional performers, Natalia’s practice centers on excavating imagined and archived history, decentralizing canonical narratives through embodied reenactments, and challenging written history by foregrounding instead the creation of new mythologies. Her multi-channel films, performance works and multiplatform projects explore familial, neighborly and citizen relationships in the context of Caribbean colonial history, and the resulting imperialist oppression that has altered generations of families’ material and spiritual trajectories. Bringing the practice of theater into the camera, Natalia explores a methodology that creates its own decolonial rhythms.
She has been an artist fellow at the Smithsonian, and participated in residencies at Amant Foundation (NY), MassMoca (Massachusetts) , Fonderie Darling (Montreal), and Pioneer Works (NY, Upcoming). She has exhibited her work at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Museo Cabañas (Guadalajara, MX), TEA Espacio de las Artes en Tenerife (Canary Islands), SeMa (Korea), The Flaherty Seminar, the Walt Disney Modular Theatre in California, among other venues, festivals and performance venues internationally. She has taught interdisciplinary performance and film at Bard College, CalArts, and MICA.
Natalia was born in Puerto Rico, developing her practice nomadically between Puerto Rico, New York, Montréal, Miami, Los Angeles and Germany, but is currently based in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
General Information
This class is curated in partnership with The School of Making Thinking.