ACTION THEATER is a training system in physical theater improvisation that builds vocal, verbal, and physical performance skills, hones awareness and increases expressive range.

Action Theater uses sensation and embodied presence as a doorway into the agility of a vast imagination. The exercises incorporated are simple, playful and challenging and work on a deep level to expand moment-to-moment awareness and its relationship to both action and being. How do we fully experience how we are? The distracting power of judgement and fear is calmed as one's curiosity and compassion for the smallest moment is roused, however lovely or terrifying it might be.

Central elements to the practice include listening, composition, musicality, alignment between form and feeling, the beauty of lost detail, the inhabiting of mercurial energies, and a way of relaxing into the active nature of time and change with eloquence, precision, and passion. The work addresses spontaneous expression with an eye towards how to apply skills to set pieces as well.

In workshops we improvise our way forward supported by a rigorous and intelligent curiosity in an encouraging atmosphere. Workshops are open to all, those with theater/movement training and those without.

CASSIE TUNICK is a performer, writer, and teacher. Originally trained in ballet, judo, gymnastics and modern dance technique she began an intensive practice in Action Theater with Ruth Zaporah in 1991 and since then has been improvising and creating original physical theater work on stages around the world.

Fascination with language led to an MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University, a small Buddhist college, which then influenced her theater work on many levels. In 1999 she became a member of inkBoat company and plunged into Butoh dance and a starkly imagistic theater-making that resonated with an ongoing delight in the surreal and darker world of fairytale, myth, and the profoundly mysterious nature of being.

Since moving to New York in 2004 she has continued to perform solo work as well as collaborating with artists Tanya Calamoneri & Company SoGoNo, composer Keren Rosenbaum's REFLEX ENSEMBLE, Shinichi Iova-Koga, the Action Theater Ensemble, and is featured in three films with and by experimental video artist David Finkelstein. She performs in the company she founded: Second Nature (with musician Danny Tunick and long-time colleague Heather Harpham) and recently created a two-woman show with Abby Bender, Totally Other, a dance-theater work examining fluidity of identity and imagination.

Cassie is a Senior Teacher of Ruth Zaporah's Action Theater, devoted to the practice and development of improvisation for the last 30 years. She worked closely with Ruth editing Improvising on the Edge: Notes from On and Off Stage. She currently teaches on faculty at Emerson College in Boston. Her teaching and performance practices inform and re-invigorate each other.