Performing Arts

MACD: Academic Practice
Date: Wednesday 26th January
Speaker: Pete Brooks
Topic : Performance & Design


Pete Brooks is conducting The MA Performing Arts at Central Saint Martins. He has been in the Performing Arts for seventeen years.
In this “exposé” he wanted to share his professional practise by showing us excerpts of his work and commenting them.
Throughout his presentation you could sense the passion he has for the work he produces and that he was craving to infect the public with the same passion, he told us that his aim was ton invite the audience to ‘invest emotionally ‘ in the narratives he creates. He wants to ‘make them cry’.
He strongly believes that, theatre has lost the power of creating the magical “suspension of disbelief’. Because ‘we are children of Brecht”, the illusion on the stage has been broken. In the postmodern world, it is rather challenging to bring back the enchantment and the pleasure, and this particular challenge is being overcome by the performing arts. You get lost in the narrative, you highly believe the animations to be real and you feel being part of the story, even though you don’t get everything, it’s like living a dream, your dreams aren’t linear there are fragments, bits and pieces of both your memory and phantasms so are Pete Brooks narratives. The theme he evokes and illustrates in his composition are death, loss, rebirth, illness, doubt, and the way he treats these them are quite poetic and obsessive you get contaminated by those in a way you’re both highly attracted and repelled by them.



Chloe Belloin
MACD