FADlab Mission
Fictionalized Auto Drama Laboratory exists to help performance artists hone their own creative processes in order to actualize the possibilities of sharing their own brave stories.
FADlab Vision
We believe in a world where shame cannot thrive in the light of bravery and truth.
What is Fictionalized Auto Drama?
Taken from the literary genre of auto fiction and the medium of dramatic arts, simply put, fictionalized auto drama is an autobiographical story combined with fictional elements told through performance.
What is FADlab?
FADlab, currently in association with Windmill Arts, is a creative process experiment that exists to help professional performance artists develop and hone their own written and somatic processes while creating brave new work. We believe that brave and personal creative processes thrive best with a trustworthy map—developed by the artist themselves.
In order to fully realize, shape, and share the possibilities of telling our own brave stories, we are choosing to fictionalize our personal encounters through an absurd or surreal performance convention, ideally written from a shameless perspective and told through the body as our focal instrument. Practicing and evolving new work, especially while creating a brave and truthful story, doesn’t always have the luxury of the time, space, and room desired for experimentation, failure, and the elimination of toxic shame along the way.
The subconscious is a wild frontier, yet essential to explore when sharing a personal truth. What if an artist could build themselves protective devices to weather the journey? We think we can, and with the generosity of Windmill Arts, we are going to share our outcomes.
FADlab at Windmill Arts seeks not only to help performing artists develop personal artistic processes, but also hone the development of the FADlab process itself. Along with Windmill Arts and the commitment of three writers, this current FADlab experiment will last for two years. From idea to production, from practicum to program development, FADlab will record and document its findings with the purpose of helping others more easily shape their own brave stories.
Why tell "brave" stories?
Since the dawn of proto-language, stories have been necessary for survival. One grunt at a fellow Homo habilis could mean, "Beware! Danger! There's a bear behind you! You're about to be eaten and if you disappear our entire community will starve to death because you're the most efficient hunter/farmer/breeder of us all therefore the longevity of our very species and its existence depends on you! Run!"
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One syllable is its own beginning, middle, and end.
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Stories are key to living, and FADlab believes BRAVE stories are the difference between simple survival and participating in a continuously evolving, thriving, dynamic greater consciousness.
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"Brave" is an experience that means "to endure pain." While pain and endurance are relative to an individual practice, essentially, bravery is growth. And growth is movement. And movement is life.
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Humans are creatures of influence. When we see someone perform a behavior and witness the result of its consequences, FEEL what it's like, collective energy shifts. The tribe tends to model the same behavior—or, at least experiment with it ourselves—especially if the reward is to feel good.
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And brave stories can make us feel good! We get to learn the lesson, feel the rush of overcoming heroic challenges. Stories expand our civility, our kindness, our understanding of our individual experiences and how they are related to humanity as a whole.
When we hear brave stories, we have the opportunity to strengthen our empathy for one another. Brave stories can make us grow. They can make us more alive and aware, and help take our human experiences to less toxic, kinder, more dynamic levels. Every cell in our universe has been dividing and polarizing since the Big Bang. Great stories, brave stories, they bring us back together.
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FADlab exists to further prove this theory by way of artist-led discovery and better access to a personal creative process. We believe brave stories change the world, and we believe bravery in teaching ourselves how to tell them is the best way forward.
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FADlab is sponsored in part by:
