MOVEMENT DIRECTOR  – we need to talk….

Just Jones & is a theatre company touring nationally with our base in South East London. Our shows are built with, by and for our audiences which makes them powerful, immediate, universal, poetic, a bit bonkers, very ambitious, totally collaborative. We create interactive shows about the questions that won’t leave us alone – the big stuff of the 21st century. In playful, provocative ways, we ask our audiences to help us make the show from idea to performance. We’re not experts on climate change, social justice or how to run the world. We are fascinated by what’s going on and we want to share our excitement, confusion and experiences. As we make our shows, we’re always learning about theatre-making, the theme we’re exploring and about your town, city or village.We tour because we believe that theatre is part of a conversation. Every performance in every town adds to the performance and the conversation.  Along the way, we invite artists and the public to meet, swap experience and make stuff in workshops, residencies and projects. Currently we’re looking for a Movement Director interested in inclusive practice.

“What you are doing is quite radical in theatre, it shouldn’t be, but it is” Audience Member

Our next production We Will Be Happy Here is set in a future community embodying the values of equity and fairness. Don’t worry it also shows people as ridiculous, inconsistent, funny, vile and wonderful.

It needs an inclusive cast. We have devised a casting project that mirrors the values of the fictional city we create in WWBHH. We want to liberate ourselves and potential performers from the commodification and type casting which ties women, men, actors of colour and Deaf/disabled, trans actors, younger/older actors into narrow casting tropes.

Building on experience of gender blind projects at Theatre 503 and reversing gender in our own adaptation of An Enemy of the People, we are inviting actors to read the synopsis, hear about the characters’ beliefs, values and actions, and to submit their suggestion of which character they might play irrespective of age, gender, ethnicity, dis/ability, sexuality. We intend to identify an inclusive cast that challenges heteronormative gender, age and ableist assumptions.

The process includes initial workshops, paid recall sessions, a week of rehearsals with the inclusive cast resulting in options for a revised script making creative advances from the opportunities that this assumption-free casting provides. The week will end in a sharing for industry contacts, our partners from Ramps on the Moon, Central School Speech and Drama and 4 venues where we will tour. We will take 2 days to test technical & creative ways of making the performances accessible. The whole process will be documented & evaluated by MA students from CSSD for sharing with the sector and creation CPD workshops.

We’re on the hunt for a movement director who has experience or interest in learning about working with an integrated company of Deaf/disabled and non-disabled performers. The inclusive casting process will culminate in a week of rehearsal where we make adaptations to the script as we have it (which already includes space for improv and more devising). This means that we might take text out of a scene altogether or add it in to a movement sequence – other examples will present themselves as we go. As this is an open inclusive casting, we don’t know who the disabled and non-disabled performers will be. So actors are not being cast for their disability, ethnicity, gender or age, all are being cast for what they can do. This applies also to the Movement Director.

The show is an ensemble piece and we are using integrated captioning. We’d like to hear from movement directors who are interested in this and recommendations of work/links by movement directors to see.

The whole project is subject to funding but the rough requirement for diaries is a week in May and a week in June 2018. Fees will be ITC/Equity as a minimum (plus access costs as necessary – because we’re both progressive and old-fashioned like that and believe in paying people properly).

The tour is planned for Autumn 2018 with rehearsals late summer.

If you’re interested in having an initial conversation or want us to see your work,  please email with CV and links to work: hallo [@] justjonestheatre.org.uk

Find us here www.justjonestheatre.org.uk @justjonestheatr