John Thiel
Theatre-maker. Teacher. Community Engaged Practitioner.
John Thiel is a multidisciplinary theatre-maker and educator whose work as teacher, director, choreographer, writer, musician, and performer centers on the growth of artists and communities of artists through shared creative practices. He values ensemble-based theatre-
making, movement-based approaches to theatre training, and the building and bridging of communities through storytelling, truth-telling, and dialogue.
John has facilitated devised theatrical productions and applied theatre workshops in college communities and K-12 schools, dance and theatre companies, community centers, living rooms, and places of worship.
A classroom drama teacher, he has taught acting and creative theatre with young people and adults in Boston, Massachusetts and his hometown of Stockton, California, where he has also choreographed and directed musical productions with young artists.
John holds an MFA in Theatre Education and Applied Theatre at Emerson College in Boston (where he received his MA) and a BS in Elementary Education from Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he studied theatre and dance. His research interests include devised and collaborative theatre in higher education, the practice of process drama for cultivating social responsibility with young learners, embodied exploration of family and ethnicity, and the connections theatre artists make between performance traditions in their upbringing and their current artistic practice.
Why do we sacrifice so much energy to our art? Not in order to teach others but to learn with them what our existence, our organism, our personal and unrepeatable experience have to give us; to learn to break down the barriers which surround us and to free ourselves from the breaks which hold us back, from the lies about ourselves which we manufacture daily for ourselves and for others; to destroy the limitations caused by our ignorance and lack of courage; in short, to fill the emptiness in us: to fulfill ourselves. Art is neither a state of the soul (in the sense of some extraordinary, unpredictable moment of inspiration) nor a state of man (in the sense of a profession or social function). Art is a ripening, an evolution, an uplifting which enables us to emerge from darkness into a blaze of light.
Jerzy Grotowski
