Playing on the Page:
A Master Class in Creative Writing
Instructor: Marlene Ondrea Nichols
Date/Time: November 2, 2013, 2-5 pm.
Cost: $45
This Master Class gets your creative juices flowing and your pen moving! Through a series of guided improvisational writing exercises, participants will create content from “the words up.” This playful approach captures spontaneous ideas on the page before any judgment can set in. The goal is to help expand the imagination and empower your own unique voice. By the end of the session, participants will walk away with pages of raw material that can serve as the basis for a monologue, a storytelling piece, a poem, or a personal story written for a loved one.
This is an open level class. It is appropriate for beginners who are “writer-curious” as well as established artists. (And if you think you’re not creative and can’t write then come and discover that you are and you can!)
About Marlene Ondrea Nichols
Take the avant-garde intelligence of Samuel Beckett, mix in the razor sharp humor of David Sedaris, cinch it all into a Dior gown and you’ve got Marlene Ondrea Nichols. As a writer she tackles the universal dramas of childhood, love, betrayal, and death, and makes us laugh till our cheeks hurt. As a live solo performer she brings to the stage a tribe of eccentric characters based on the people she meets in her travels between Los Angeles, New York, and Europe. With a deep love for the unusual she acknowledges she’s never met an accent she didn’t love.
In her current solo show project, Unzipped w/ Baggage, she tears down the wall that separates reality from imagination and memory and takes us on one woman’s search for home and her attempt to corral the inhabitants of her life’s baggage before it’s too late. As a story producer, Marlene worked for Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, 2012 www.climaterealityproject.org producing several short documentaries that look at the impact of global warming on the lives of diverse communities in South Africa, The Netherlands, and the Midwestern United States.
She has taught at the California Institute of the Arts, guest lectured at NYU and offers one-on-one coaching through her Creativity For Genius moniker. Her prose work has appeared in The Writer’s Toolbox (Chronicle Book). She currently lives in Los Angeles.
More Master Classes To Come!
- Suzuki technique
- Spolin games
- Alexander Technique
- Directing
- Shakespeare
- Clowning
- Mask Work (LeCoq)
- Mime
- Tablework
- Stage Combat
- Circus Arts
- Yoga for actors
- Relaxation techniques
- Dance for actors: Ballet, Tap, Jazz, Modern
- Puppetry
- Playwriting