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Fiona Templeton's work ranges across various disciplines. Her performance work is born of a
conceptual investigation of theatre as a total medium – language, space, and
time, and as an "art of relation", in particular in its thinking of
the audience. It is daring in scale
and in poetic density. She has been awarded fellowships from the U.S. National Endowment for
the Arts in both Poetry and Visual Arts (new genres); an Abendzeitung
Muenchen Sterne des Jahres for theatre; two fellowships from New York Foundation
for the Arts for performance, & one for playwriting. She was 1996-7
Senior writer-in-residence at the English Faculty of Cambridge University,
and 2000-2003 Arts and Humanities Research Board fellow with the Department
of Theatre Studies, University of Lancaster.
In 2002 she received the annual Foundation for Contemporary
Performance Arts award for theatre.
She is a Research Lecturer at Brunel University. Born in Scotland, Fiona lives mostly in New York since the late 70s,
writing and directing. Her award-winning and influential YOU--The City, "an
intimate citywide play for an audience of one", has since been recreated
in six countries and languages, including at the London International
Festival of Theatre in 1989, and most recently as a key project of Rotterdam
Cultural Capital of Europe 2001. There is also a film of the New York
version. Her current project, The Medead, is an epic that
retells the life-story of Medea, for 12 performers, to be produced by the
Glasgow Tramway and the Rotterdamse Schouwburg, and has involved research
into the origins of the Medea figure in what is now the Republic of
Georgia. Sections of the work have
been seen recently at Glasgow Tramway at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s
Swing Space at 15 Nassau. Her most recent commission was L’Ile
(The Island), a theatre game by appointment, for the opening of Lille
European Cultural Capital 2004 in December 2003. Her most recent collaboration was with Bock & Vincenzi, on their
project Invisible Dances, recently at the Venice Biennial. She was co-founder of the London company, The Theatre of Mistakes,
in the 70s. The company's work had a seminal influence on British performance
& theatre of the last 2 decades; the company's book, written by Templeton
and Anthony Howell, Elements of Performance Art, is soon to be
republished. (See Art into Theatre
by Nick Kaye, Harwood 1997.) Her collaboration with the late Michael Ratomski, Recognition,
performed live by Fiona in conversation with Michael on video, was produced at
the Kitchen, New York, the ICA, London, and the Cambridge Conference on
Contemporary Poetry 1996-7. In the
80’s she created a number of small scale and large scale site-specific works,
as well as collaborations with artists including Julian Maynard Smith,
Elliott Sharp, Miranda Payne, Peter Stickland, Glenys Johnson, Melanie
Nielson and Lenora Champagne. Her books include poetry (London, Hi Cowboy, oops the join, Mum in
Airdrie), plays (Delirium of lnterpretations,
YOU--The City), performance (Elements of Performance Art) and the
visual arts (Cells of Release). This was
created as a 2-year installation in an abandoned prison in Philadelphia, in
collaboration with Amnesty International & Prison Sentences. She has made a film of YOU-The City, and a short opera on
videotape with composer Randall Eng, The Woman in the Green Coat. Fiona regularly
publishes poetry and theoretical articles.
She was U.S. editor of Shattered Anatomies, an anthology box of
objects and writings on traces of contemporary performance, published by
Arnolfini Live, Bristol; U.S.
contributing editor of Grey Suit, a magazine for art and literature on
videotape; and contributing editor of Big Allis poetry magazine, New
York. |
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