First Cut.
A Director's Method for Collage-Based Performance
You have materials. A letter that arrived too late. A legal document. A movement phrase you can't get out of your head. A photograph from the wrong decade. You don't have a script, and you don't want one.
This workshop gives you a method for building performance from what you actually have.
This is the desk work that makes the studio work precise. You will not need a studio to begin. What you build here, you bring to the room. This three-week workshop gives you that method.
First Cut asks:
how do you build a performance when there is no script?
Your materials. Your collection. A structure that does not precede you - one you will build from heterogeneous things that were not designed to be placed next to each other. The director's job: construct the architecture. Make the cut mean.
Everything can be a material. Not everything should be.
The workshop works with eight categories of source material. You choose from all of them - but your collection must span at least four. The constraint is not arbitrary: collage requires difference. A collection where everything shares the same temperature and grain is not a collage. It is a bundle.
01
Personal documents
Letters, diaries, photographs, medical records, school reports, official correspondence sent to or about a specific person.
02
Official & institutional documents
Legal texts, contracts, protocols, regulations, census data, autopsy reports, meeting minutes. The language of authority.
03
Found texts
News articles, advertisements, instruction manuals, warning labels, spam emails, menus, product descriptions.
04
Literary & poetic fragments
Poems, novel passages, myths, fairy tales, sacred texts - used as material, not as script. Handled with care.
05
Scientific & technical texts
Research abstracts, field notes, taxonomies, medical textbooks, Wikipedia entries, environmental reports.
06
Memory & testimony
First-person accounts, oral history transcripts, recollections. The incompleteness is not a flaw. It is grain.
Three weeks, one collection, one complete compositional cycle
You bring your own materials. The workshop gives you the method for working with them: from description, to structural score, to performance concept. Each week adds a layer; each round of feedback moves the work forward.
01
Week one
What is a material?
What Is a Material? Properties, Categories, and the Logic of Selection
Lecture
Source vs material. Five properties of a material: grain, temperature, duration, mode of address, resistance. Eight categories of source material. Why the collection is an argument, not an accumulation. The principle of necessary friction.
Assignment
Assemble 5-7 materials from at least 4 categories. Describe each precisely - what it does, not only what it is. State the logic of your selection. Identify one unexpected relationship within the collection.
Individual written feedback returned within 3-4 working days. Focuses on precision of description and coherence of the collection as an argument.
02
Week two
The cut
The Cut: Montage as a Compositional Method
Lecture
Eisenstein's montage of attractions. What happens in the gap between materials - three kinds of gap. Six structural principles: juxtaposition, accumulation, interruption, echo, collision, transformation. Score vs script. How to notate a structural score.
Assignment
Build a structural score for a 10-15 minute performance using your collection. Notate each section: material, performer mode, duration, cut. Write commentary on three key compositional decisions and their alternatives.
Feedback focuses on the architecture: whether the score has a beginning, a centre of gravity, and an ending in deliberate relationship.
03
Week three
The body in the score
The Body in the Score: Performer, Material, and the Performance Concept
Lecture
The performer in collage work: not a character, but a body with a score. Three modes of relationship to material - inhabiting, reporting, resisting. Physical action and heterogeneous text. Duration as a compositional variable. The ethics of working with real materials.
Assignment
Six sections: compositional statement, revised materials list, revised score, performer's relationship to material, spatial and temporal architecture, one open question with instinct.
Final feedback is summative: development across all three weeks, strengths of compositional thinking, and where relevant, a recommendation for continued work at NIPAI.
Practical exercises embedded in every lecture
Each lecture contains exercises designed to be completed before writing the assignment. They are short, specific, and designed to move you out of thinking-about and into working-with.
01
Temperature Mapping
Mark every sentence in a text that shifts the temperature - where it gets hotter or colder. What produces the shifts? What is the overall temperature of the text, and where is it most volatile?
03
The Unexpected Relationship
Lay out your materials. Look at them for five minutes without writing. Then write one sentence about a relationship between two of them that you did not intend. Do not explain it. Name it.
05
The Repeated Return
Choose one material that could sustain three appearances. For each appearance, note: what does the audience not yet know? What changes between the first and second? What does the third do that a single appearance cannot?
02
The Resistance Test
Describe a material in the flattest possible way. Then describe it as if it were the most urgent thing in the world. The gap between those two descriptions is the material's resistance.
04
The Forced Pair
Choose the two materials most resistant to being placed together. Write a five-minute score containing only these two. You are not looking for comfort. You are looking for what the friction generates.
06
Temperature Arc
Map the temperatures of your materials from cold to hot. Sketch the temperature arc of your performance. Does it begin cold and get hotter? Alternate? Arrive at a temperature it cannot sustain? There is no correct answer.
The performer is not a character.
They are a body with a score.
In collage performance, the performer's relationship to the material is a compositional decision. The director specifies not who the performer is, but how they stand in relation to what they are performing. Three fundamental modes.
01
Inhabiting
The performer is inside the material. They speak in its register, allow its language to determine their physical state. When inhabiting a letter, the performer is the person who wrote it, or the person it was written to, or both simultaneously. Creates intimacy. Risks reducing a collage to a series of small character studies.
02
Reporting
The performer is outside the material, presenting it rather than being transformed by it. They read the text rather than speak it. Maintains analytical distance. Especially useful with materials that carry strong ideological charge - it forces the audience to hear the language rather than only feel the emotional content.
03
Resisting
The performer is in conflict with the material. Their body or voice contradicts what they are performing. A clinical text performed while the body enacts what is being described. An instruction read with increasing reluctance. The gap between the performer and the material becomes legible - and meaningful.
What you walk away with
Three weeks of structured work on your own materials produces a set of concrete, usable documents - and a method that applies beyond them.
01
Three written lectures from NIPAI faculty
~10,000–12,000 words total. Not generic content on experimental theatre - material built on the specific methodological approach NIPAI has developed over 25 years of practice-based training.
02
A material inventory for your collection
A precise, professionally written description of your five to seven source materials, including their properties, the logic of their selection, and one unexpected relationship between them. A working document you can return to.
03
A structural score for a 10–15 minute performance
A notated sequence of sections, with materials, performer modes, durations, and cut notations. A document you could hand to a performer. The first complete compositional arc you have built for your materials.
04
A full performance concept document
A working document for the performance you have been building across three weeks: compositional statement, revised score, performer's relationship to material, spatial and temporal architecture, open question. Usable in a rehearsal room.
05
Three rounds of individual written feedback
~1,000–1,600 words of feedback written specifically for your work and your materials. Not a template - a response to your particular collection, your particular score, your particular compositional thinking.
06
Certificate in Collage-Based Performance Composition, NIPAI Berlin
Issued upon submission of all three assignments. Records the workshop title, dates, learning hours (~16–19 hours), Gennadiy Ostrenko's name as tutor, and confirmation of all assessed work. A professional development document.
Who this workshop is for
You do not need experience in experimental theatre. You need some experience of making or performing - in any form - a willingness to think analytically about your own creative process, and materials you want to work with.
01
Directors moving toward non-linear work
You have been directing from scripts and you want to develop a compositional method that does not depend on a playwright's structure. You want to build from your own materials and understand the logic of what you are building.
02
Performers beginning to make their own work
You are a performer who wants to direct or devise, and you have a collection of materials you don't know how to organise. You need a method, not a genre. The workshop gives you the tools to think compositionally about what you have.
03
Choreographers working with text and objects
You understand bodies in space and you want to understand how to work with language, document, and found material alongside physical action. The workshop is specifically designed for the coexistence of movement and heterogeneous material.
04
Devisers and theatre-makers
You make performance from found or personal material and you want to formalise your compositional instincts. The workshop offers a vocabulary for what you are already doing and a structure for developing it further.
05
Dramaturgs and writer-directors
You work at the intersection of text and performance and you want to develop methods for working with documentary, testimonial, or archival material. The workshop addresses the ethics and compositional logic of working with real materials.
06
Practitioners anywhere in the world
Fully remote, fully asynchronous, no time zone requirement. No studio, no equipment, no travel. Works alongside any professional schedule. All you need is a computer, materials, and the ability to read and write in English.
Format
The workshop is built on one principle: individual written feedback on your individual materials and your individual compositional decisions. Everything else follows from that.
Delivery
By email, Monday morning each week
Submissions
By Sunday, end of each week
Feedback returned
Within 3–4 working days
Total workload
~16–19 hours across 3 weeks
What this workshop does not include:
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No live video sessions or Zoom calls
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No recorded video lectures or screencasts
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No group discussion board or forum
-
No peer review or participant interaction
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No group messaging or chat
-
No real-time requirements of any kind
Your tutor:
Gennadiy Ostrenko
Movement Director · Expert in Theatre Biomechanics · Stage Designer · NIPAI, Berlin
Gennadiy Ostrenko began his career in Fine Arts before moving into theatre as a stage designer and later as a movement director. Over three decades, he has developed a practice that spans physical performance, compositional method, and performer training - work built from heterogeneous materials, multiple traditions, and a refusal to separate the analytical from the physical.
His practice draws on Meyerhold's Theatre Biomechanics, Mikhail Chekhov's technique, contact improvisation, Tai Chi Chen, animal movement research, Butoh, Noh, and Chinese Opera. This is not eclecticism - it is a compositional method: the Ostrenko Method, developed together with his brother, is precisely a system for creating performance from multiple sources, concepts, and existing material in ways that generate something new from their collision. Which is exactly what this workshop is about.
As a movement director, Gennadiy has led international productions across Russia, Ukraine, Austria, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, Latvia, and Malta - including the International Shakespeare Performance Project, where he directed movement for Passions of Romeo with actors from nine countries simultaneously. His stage and costume designs have been created for professional theatres across Eastern Europe.
Since 2004, Gennadiy has been a core member of the NIPAI faculty. He teaches practitioners from more than 25 countries. In First Cut, he reads every assignment you submit and writes every round of feedback personally - not as a course administrator, but as a practitioner who has spent decades building performance from exactly the kind of materials this workshop works with.
A starting point, not a destination
This course is the first step in NIPAI's professional development pathway. Graduates can continue into longer programmes - each building on the last.
First Cut
3-week course · One scene · Method introduction
You Are Here
The Director and the Play
3-month module · One full play · Professional play analysis
Theatre Directing for Beginners
12-month certificate · Director's Book · Individual mentorship
Advanced Theatre Directing Diploma
18-month diploma · Graduation production · Full methodology
Graduates of First Cut who continue into longer NIPAI programmes may discuss tuition alignment individually during admissions.
See funding opportunities →
About NIPAI
The New International Performing Arts Institute is a private professional training institute established in Berlin in 2000. For over 25 years, NIPAI has prepared practitioners for the international performing arts field through practice-based, methodology-driven programmes.
25+
Years of operation
25+
Countries represented
Berlin
Germany · Since 2000
You have materials.
Now build something from them.
Tuition Fee - €220
Three weeks. Your own collection. A structural score. A performance concept. Gennadiy Ostrenko reads every word you write about every piece of material you bring - not as a class, but as a practitioner who has spent decades building performance from exactly this kind of work.