Jim Manganello’s teaching practice

Though I often us texts (theatrical and otherwise), my ultimate target as a teacher is the agency of the theatre artist and stretching the collaborative muscles. I take an embodied approach not only to performance, but to the total act of making theatre - and I enjoy teaching not only actors, but directors, designers, composers, and other potential collaborators. I’ve taught in drama schools including Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Drama Centre, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and Rose Bruford. I see my work not as feeding some industry - but instead nurturing agency and curiousity, and equally important to me is facilitating groups of people who don’t consider themselves to be ‘professional’ artists or ‘artists-in-training’. I’ve brought together large, intergenerational groups to collaborate together on a common project, whether that be an overtly artistic artefact like a community opera or as apparently technical as building a website. The common thread through all of my teaching is a curiosity about the world, and a set of simple but expansive theatrical tools. I have benefitted from a set of extraordinary teachers, and they sit beside me when I work with students: Lassaâd Saïdi (mask…and then everything), Norman Taylor (movement), Paola Coletto (clown), Marjorie Levinson (poetry), and Rose Ann Roarty-Collins (high school English).

My full teaching statement is here.

Previous teaching

Acting & movement (University/drama school) Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Drama Centre London, Rose Bruford

Theatre- & dance-making workshops at The Place, Bristol Old Vic, National Theatre Scotland, Contact (Manchester), Dance City, The Work Room, Dance Base (Scotland’s National Centre for Dance), Interlochen Centre for the Arts, Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit

Opera directing Birkbeck College (University of London)

Dramatic texts National Operatic and Dramatic Association Summer School (‘A Century of Plays’: one play from each decade of the last 100 years in 5 days)