SITI returns to summer home

	SITI players in Who Do You Think You Are?

SITI is back on campus!

The internationally acclaimed theater company has returned for a 16th consecutive summer here, featuring public events and the company’s annual training workshop (through June 21) for pre-professional and professional artists. The 17-member ensemble of actors and theater artists (including Skidmore theater artist-in-residence Will Bond) is known for generating groundbreaking theater while training artists from around the world; this summer, nearly half the workshop’s 59 participants hail from outside the U.S.

The company of collaborative creator/teacher/actors shares a distinctive style—lithe, incomparably physical, and vocally commanding, steeped in improvisation and founded in such diverse influences as ballet, traditional Japanese and Greek theater, and martial arts. “SITI does not rehearse, it trains,” according to American Theater magazine, adding that for these boldly athletic performers, “Muscle has become the medium of the mind.”

While at Skidmore, SITI Company will present the following:

• The neuroscience-inspired play Who Do You Think You Are, at 8 p.m. Saturday, June 14, in Bernhard Theater.  (For ticket information, go to www.saratogaartsfest.org.) Performed to Darron L. West’s sound design, the new production is said to explore neuroplasticity, as one critic put it, pursuing such questions as whether the human mind can, study itself “as time, space, memory, and certitude are all stretched out of shape?”
• Two theater showings of original works developed by workshop participants during the residency (both starting at 7 p.m. on the evenings of June 19 and 20, in Bernhard Theater’s Black Box). Admission is free.
• A demonstration of the Suzuki method,  the rigorous physical and vocal discipline for actors created by SITI cofounder Tadashi Suzuki (10 a.m. June 20, Bernhard Theater). Admission is free.
• A demonstration of the improvisational technique called “Viewpoints,” adapted by cofounder/director Anne Bogart  to teach actors to function together spontaneously and intuitively (2 p.m. June 20, Bernhard Theater).  Admission is free.

Founded in 1992 by Bogart and Suzuki as the Saratoga International Theatre Institute, SITI was designed to revitalize contemporary theater through the cross-cultural exchange of dance, music, art, and performance. The company was originally envisioned as a summer institute in Saratoga Springs, but has since expanded to encompass a year-round program based in New York City and a summer season in Saratoga.

“The strongest program we have now is our four weeks in Saratoga, where we’re all together,” Bogart has said; her company, whose members travel often and teach widely, is seeking a permanent home.  Meanwhile,  “people move through that crucible for four weeks and they come out altered.”

For more information, go to www.siti.org or www.skidmore.edu/summer or call  (518) 580-5595 in the Office of the Dean of Special Programs.