Patrick Shaw
playwright
About me:
I'm an Austin-based playwright, director, and educator. My work's been produced at UT Austin, CMPBS (Austin), The Drilling Company, Galapagos Art Space, Cherry Pit, The Flea, Hudson River Guild, The Motor Company, Gorilla Tango, and Bradley University. I've developed plays at Hyde Park Theater, Last Frontier Theatre Conference, Great Plains Theatre Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Millay Colony, Norm’s Fish Camp, and The Plant at Kyle. As a performer, I've collaborated with Underbelly, The Duplicates, Paper Chairs, Bakerloo Theatre Project, and Spessard Dance, among others. I co-directed Rude Mechs' Off Center Teens and currently teach playwriting and directing at the University of Texas at Austin.
.jpeg)
If you'd still like to know more,
please just ask: Contact
If you'd like to know more:
When I was dancing, I particularly loved contact improvisation and began to suspect that the real discipline of Contact was not so much to connect with another dancer or to generate phrases as it was to learn how to welcome disorientation, to build a practice of falling and trusting that something inside of you – a technique, an instinct, a trust in your partner - will deliver you back to safety.
Similarly, my plays try to model the pleasures of a good partner in improvised dance: Someone indirect, energetic, decisive, and provocatively there, predictably unknown. I strive for my work to hold its own willful mass, to be something against which/with which we can better understand what the hell’s going on around here, both inside of us and out, both now and before.
Or maybe—when it’s working, when it’s really working through something live—I write stories with the hope that we can find the ground before the ground finds us.
