ARTISTS
The Play Society convenes for intensive work sessions,
comprised of performance training grounded in play,
embodied exploration, and collaboration.
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Participants work with celebrated practitioners and educators
from around the world — each offering a distinct perspective and
dynamic approach to performance and creation,
united by an ethos of play.
Through these encounters, artists will find the support and challenge
they need to expand their empathic and expressive capacities,
to enlarge their sense of what might be possible on stage,
and to bring their newfound tools & capacities for playful investigation
to their creative practices and communities.
JUSTINE WOLF WILLIAMS
Justine (she, they) is an actor-creator, theater & filmmaker, and celebrated teacher of play, clown, ensemble-based and devised performance. In the US, she has developed new work and appeared on stages at Ars Nova, NYTW, The Public Theater, Dixon Place, Abrons Arts, Shakespeare Theater of NJ, Yale Rep and Berkeley Rep, among others. Film work has premiered at Woodstock Film Festival, New Directors/New Films and Maryland Film Festival, and she was an artist-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she created an artist hack of the museum’s collections using new media and performance to bring the voices/work of elder immigrant artists in NYC to life inside the museum.
Internationally, Justine has presented new work at the Sibiu International Theater Festival, National Arts Festival in South Africa, and has collaborated with companies in France, Poland, Israel, Macedonia, Brazil and South Africa. She has completed residencies and fellowships with Queer|Art, New Georges, Lighthouse Film Festival, The Orchard Project and NY Women in Film & Television, and is currently writing a book on Play.
She has been at Yale School of Drama since 2013 teaching Acting as Play, Collaboration, and advising & facilitating new play development, and completed her MFA at CUNY/Brooklyn College in Performance and New Media.
KATIE DOWN
Katie is a sound artist, experimenter, flutist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, sound practitioner, music psychotherapist, and teacher/facilitator.
Her music intersects the realms of sound art, free improvisation, folk, Jazz, and "world" music. Her homemade and constructed instruments include glass percussion, toys, broken things, and steel cello. She also plays ukuleles of all shapes and sizes, and likes to sing with people. Her band The Ukuladies performs original comic tunes and lots of bawdy songs from the 20s and 30s.
​Katie is an accomplished theater-maker and collaborator, and has created numerous sound scores for theatre, dance, and independent films. Her sound designs for theatre and dance have garnered Drama Desk nominations and an award for best sound design from The Connecticut Critic's Circle for her work at Long Wharf Theatre. She is the recipient of several grants, artist residencies, and composer commissions including the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, The Jerome Foundation, BAM, Watermill, Chashama, Music Omi, and Meet the Composer. ​
She hosts and curates workshops and events at Sound Well Barn in Upstate NY, an intimate artist retreat center she co-founded that convenes people around creativity and well-being.
EMMANUELLE DELPECH
Emmanuelle was classically trained at Ecole Supérieure d’Art Dramatique de la Ville de Paris and then studied physical theater at l’Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq where she also completed a 3rd pedagogical year, which makes her a certified Lecoq teacher. Emmanielle also holds an MFA from Temple University in Directing.
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Emmanuelle has been a core member of the renowned Philadelphia-based company, Pig Iron Theatre Company, for many years, working as an actor/creator. She is also a professor at the Pig Iron School for Advanced Training, an MFA program in conjunction with Rowan University.
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As an independent artist, Emmanuelle directs new creations for other artists, directs for regional theater and creates and performs in her own pieces.
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As a teacher, Emmanuelle has also taught at Yale University, Temple University, Swarthmore College, Bryn Mawr College and University of the Arts, and was a regular faculty member of the Headlong Performance Institute.
THE PLAY SOCIETY partners with Atlantic Theatre Arts, a music and theatre company based in Paris, France to co-produce our Paris-based sessions. The company is founded and directed by Adam Alexander and Lauren Van Kempen.
