Theatre

Faculty

Andy Belser


Andy Belser is the Head of the Theatre Department at Juniata College and the Artistic Director of TGP.  He is a director, a certified Fitzmaurice teacher, and a master Contact Improvisation teacher.  He has taught and created using a variety of modes including: Lecoq, Grotowski, and clowning.  Professor Belser was the 2003 Carnegie Pennsylvania Professor of the Year.

Kate Clarke


Kate Clarke is the TGP Academic Coordinator and a professor at Juniata College, she is a New York based singer, actress and teacher.  She has been seen on both small and regional stages in New York, Seattle, Edinburgh, San Francisco, Jacksonville, New Orleans and Moscow.  Her television credits include, Northern Exposure, Medicine Ball, and Third Watch and her film credits are Crocodile Tears, Angel Street, Music and Lyrics, and My Sassy Girl.  From 1990 to 1997, Clarke was a company member of Annex, an award winning non-profit theater in Seattle whose mission is to provide an artistic home for emerging artists and a forum for new work.  In New York, she has worked with the SITI Company, SOHO Rep, 78th Street Theater Lab and NADA, and has been a collaborator at BMI, a laboratory for new work in musical theater.  At Juniata, Clarke directed Pippin and Angles in America.

Stephanie Skura


Stephanie Skura is TGP’s Associate Artistic Director.  She and her company have toured in 27 of the United States and 13 countries at major festivals in Zurich, Vienna, Lisbon, Budapest & Vancouver, as well in such US venues as the Walker Art Center In Minneapolis, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and in New York City at Dance Theater Workshop, the Joyce Theater, Lincoln Center, Central Park Summerstage, Danspace, and Performance Space 122.  Skura has received 7 Choreography Fellowships, 5 Dance Company Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a “Bessie Awards” for Choreography.  She was a core faculty member of the annual Seattle Skinner Releasing Intensive and Teacher Certification Program for 14 years and on Graduate Faculty at the University of Washington School of Drama Professional Actors Training Program for 5 years.  She has taught at such places as the American Dance Festival, Florida Dance Festival, Bates Dance Festival, European Dance Development Center in Arnhem, Naropa Institute, Movement Research in New York, in annual teaching and directing residencies with Toronto Dance Theatre.  Skura believes that creative freedom is the source of wellness, and is passionate about bringing this freedom to as many people as possible.

Randy Ward


Randy Ward is the Resident Scenic Designer for TGP.  Ward teaches scenic and lighting design and is head of the graduate program in theatre design at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia. He designed The Studio Theatre in Blacksburg where he first designed Truth and Beauty for Ping Chong in 1999.  Since then, he has designed sets and lighting for Edda (nominated for an American Theatre Wing Hewes Design Award in 2002), Reason, and Ping Chong’s La Clemenza Di Tito.  Again Ward designed lighting for Ping Chong for Obon at Seattle Rep, The Spoleto Festival, and a Japan tour.  Ward also designed He and Nine Gates for Andy Belser at Juniata College.

John Ambrosone


John Ambrosone is TGP’s Resident Lighting Designer.  He has designed for Broadway and Off Broadway productions and was a long-time resident designer for the American Repertory Theatre in Boston.  Internationally, Ambrosone has designed productions at the Tokyo Glove Theatre in Tokyo, Japan; Royal Court and Royal Shakespeare theatres in London, England; and Moscow Art Theatre in Moscow, Russia.  Currently, he is the Assistant Professor of Lighting Design at Virginia Tech.

Catherine Fitzmaurice


Catherine Fitzmaurice, a TGP Founding Member, teaches Voice and Text to private clients in New York City, as well as elsewhere in the United States and internationally.  She has taught Voice and Text at Yale School of Drama, Harvard/A.R.T., the Juilliard School, NYU’s Graduate Acting program, ACT, UCLA, USC, New York’s Actors Center, London University, the Central School of Speech and Drama and in theatre and medical conference presentations for voice professionals.  She is Professor of Theatre at the University of Delaware, where she teaches Acting to undergraduates.  Fitzmaurice has been a Voice, Speech, Text, and Dialect coach and a consultant for award-winning directors Frank Galati, Mark Lamos, JoAnne Akalaitis, Des McAnuff, Michael Langham, Stan Wojewodski, Robert Wilson, and Ivo van Hove, at such venues as ACT, La Jolla Playhouse, Goodman Theatre, Guthrie Theatre, Stratford/Canada, Hartford Stage, Yale Repertory Theatre, McCarter Theatre, Center Stage, Shakespeare Theatre, Arena Stage, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, New York Shakespeare Festival, and New York Theatre Workshop.  She coached Haing Ngor’s Academy Award-winning performance in The Killing Fields.  Fitzmaurice has been invited to lecture and conduct workshops for theatre and medical colleagues at international theatres, universities, and conferences: at the Moscow Art Theatre, the International Slavic University in Moscow, Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski in Italy, Pan-European Voice Conference (PEVOC) in Germany, International Society for the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI) in Israel, as Chancellor’s Distinguished Lecturer in Drama at the University of California-Irvine, ATHE, VASTA, the Care of the Professional Voice Symposium of the Voice Foundation, and numerous times at several colleges and universities.  Fitzmaurice has acted for Robert Wilson as Goneril in Lear at Metromedia Studios in Los Angeles, as a member of the company at ACT for three years, on the national tour of Whose Life is it Anyway? with Brian Bedford, and many other venues.

Marika Becz


Marika Becz is a Founding Member of TGP.  She has performed in film, television, and theatre for the past 20 years.  Credits include independent and feature films, major network television, and regional theatres such as the critically acclaimed Theatre Neo in Los Angeles.  Becz has also served on the faculties and/or taught workshops for UC Irvine, Cal State Fullerton, Marymount Manhattan College, Cal State Stanislaus, CSU Summer Arts with the Second City Company, and Playwrights Horizons Theatre School at New York University.  She is a certified Fitzmaurice Voicework Associate, a certified Reiki practitioner, and a certified Yoga Instructor.  Based in New York, she is a private acting, voice, and dialects coach, and has begun writing solo performance work and fiction.

David Nevell


David Nevell is TGP’s Master Voice Teacher.  His acting credits include productions with South Coast Repertory, Shakespeare Festival/L.A., PCPA/Theaterfest, Cornerstone Theater Company, Geva Theatre Center, Pittsburgh Public Theatre, San Jose Repertory, Utah Shakespearean Festival, and Emerging Artists Theatre in New York.  Nevell is a member of Actors Equity Association and Screen Actors Guild.  He is Head of Voice/Movement and MFA Program Coordinator in the Department of Theatre and Dance at California State University, Fullerton.  As a certified Associate Teacher of Fitzmaurice Voicework, he has also taught at The Actors Center (New York), Marymount Manhattan College, plays and musicals in professional and academic theatre, including South Coast Repertory, New Zealand Drama School, Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts, and University of California, Irvine.

 

Nathan Dryden


Nathan Dryden is a performing artist choreographer and teacher in Seattle WA, where he teaches aerial dance, improvisation, and the Skinner Releasing Technique.  In 1994, he was invited by director Anne Bunker to join Orts Theatre of Dance (O-T-O) in Tucson AZ, where he began performing the aerial dances of Robert Davidson for the single-point trapeze.  He has served on faculty at SRT intensives in Turkey, New Zealand, as part of the Florida Dance Festival in Miami, FL.  He has choreographed and performed independently and with the NEW ARTiculations Dance Company, ZUZI! Move It Dance, and Zenith Dance Collective.  He performed in England for the first time in June 2008 - a solo for trapeze plus an improvised duet with dancer Julie Nathanielsz.  Dryden is scheduled to return to Europe this summer to teach and perform.  In 2006, he created the evening length work airstonewater with TGP collaborator Erica Kauffman and in 2008, he created ...and they lay, not awake, yet dreaming without sleep for the Juniata College Theatre Department.  He is currently appeared in the play Crispin: The Cross of Lead, a TGP collaboration with People’s Light & Theatre Company in Philadelphia, PA.

Yvonne Ng


Yvonne Ng is an inspiration to choreographers such as Bill James, Susan McKenzie, Maxine Heppner, José Navas, Kim Frank, Menaka Thakkar, Marie-Josée Chartier, Peter Chin, and Bill Coleman, and companies like Pedestrian Waltz Dance Projects and the Danny Grossman Dance Company.  Ng has trained and researched Chinese traditional and minority dance forms in Beijing as well as the Skinner Releasing Technique in Seattle, and in Toronto, and studied Deep Listening with Pauline Oliveros.  She has choreographed twenty-three works for York University’s Dance Department in Toronto.  Ng was honored with a Dora Mavor Moore Award in 2000, which she has been nominated eight times for, and in 2002, Ng received the prestigious K.M. Hunter Dance Award, in 2003, she was honored with both the New Pioneers Arts Award and Chalmers Arts Fellowship, then in 2007, Ng was awarded the Premier’s Emerging Artist Arts Award along with Canadian dance legend Peggy Baker.

Erica Kaufman


Erica Kaufman is a dancer, choreographer, yogini, founder of the Lîla Yoga Institute, and a contact improviser.  Kaufman currently teaches at Juniata College, where she coordinated CI36 – the international, once a decade, celebration commemorating the inception of Contact Improvisation.  As a member of the CI36 hub of contact dancers, including Ray Chung, Martin Keogh, and Nancy Stark Smith, she worked with a team of 32 international “curators” to envision, create, and manifest CI36.  Kaufman has toured as a performer and teacher in Germany, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Hungary with Mark Taylor’s Dance Alloy and the Jewish German Dance Theatre.  She has taught at Point Park College Dance Conservatory, Penn State University, University of Denver where in addition to teaching studio classes, she served as Choreographer in Residence, and in Fall 2005 as Visiting Professor at University of Marburg in Germany.

Ilse Pfeifer

Ilse Pfeifer is a performing artist and voice/movement/body coach using techniques that synthesize elements of the body, Fitzmaurice Voicework and Theatre.  She has had a celebrated career as a dancer.