Barry Laing is an award-winning director, dramaturge, performer & teacher with a wide and eclectic range of experience in many performance contexts, including theatre, dance and visual arts.
He has worked & trained extensively in Europe & Australia since 1989 with Philippe Gaulier, Monika Pagneux, Theatre de Complicite, Pantheatre, Al Wunder & Anzu Furukawa.
Barry co-founded Ex-Stasis Theatre Collective in 1992 & co-directed, adapted & performed in Beautiful Mutants for the Festival of Perth in 1993.
He was the co-recipient of the Gloria Payten & Gloria Dawn Foundations Traveling Fellowship, 1998.
Barry has worked extensively as a director and performance consultant with desoxy Theatre, The Business, Born in A Taxi, Deborah Hay, Emma Bathgate, Corpora, The Magic Bike Group, Is Theatre Ltd, Ozanam Community Centre, The Relocated Arts Project, The Amazing Business (Space Munki), The Ennio Morricone Experience (The Session – Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, 2006), Blue Vault, and Stuart Orr (Telefunken – inaugural Melbourne Fringe Touring Award, 2005; Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne and Queens Theatre, Adelaide), X:Machine and Panther.
He has performed a series of solo works — Rapture I, II, III in Melbourne & the UK (1997-2001).
In 2007 he began development of a new work, Man in the Moon, adapted from a short story by Australian writer Gail Jones.
Barry has developed unique performance training strategies and delivered a series of innovative workshops for actors, dancers, directors, musicians, choreographers, writers etc in Australia and UK (PICA, Dancehouse, Cecil St Studio, Body Voice Centre, Dartington College of the Arts, Royal Holloway College – Uni. London) 1995–present.
He is also a lecturer and teacher at, for example, Monash University, Victoria University, Deakin University and Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne – Drama School & Centre for Ideas.
He completed a PhD in Performance Studies, VU, 2002.
Publications include: ‘Pseudologia Phantastica: Performance, Discursive Lies and Critical Fictions’, Double Dialogues, Issue 8, Summer 2007/08; ‘Physical Practice/Imaginal Play: Un-disciplining the Performer’, Australasian Drama Studies, (forthcoming, 'Lineages' Issue 2008); ‘Walking the Imagination’(Lone Twin), Realtime, Issue 70, 2005; ‘The Knife and the Stethoscope: Pedagogy in Performance’, Realtime, Issue 38, 2000; ‘Beautiful Mutants’ with David Williams in R. Allen & K. Pearlman eds. Performing the Unnameable: An Anthology of Australian Performance Texts, Sydney: Currency Press, 1999; ‘Little Tyrannies, Bigger Lies: a Letter from the Other Side’ in ‘On Place’, Performance Research, 3, 2 Summer 1998.
