Living Theatre
Making theatre without a script. Every Tuesday on Waiheke, for twenty-six years.
Classes run weekly at Palm Beach Hall. They are for actors, dancers, writers and performers developing their own work, and equally for people who have never stood on a stage. What it builds is the same either way: the willingness to begin without knowing, and the attention to notice what is actually happening — inside and outside of the body, the active imagination and the room.
"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity."
— Carl Jung, Psychological Types
Open Form Improvisation
I trained for ten years with Al Wunder at his Theatre of the Ordinary in Melbourne, and went on to teach the form alongside him. As far as I know I am still the only person teaching it in New Zealand.
Open Form is improvisation without games, rules or a brief. You begin by entering the space, with your first movement or sound, and you find out what you are making while you are making it.
Then comes the feedback, and the feedback is the real craft. Done properly it does not correct a performer — it focuses them on identifying what they enjoyed in their expression and communication, and most importantly why. The aim is individual and collective growth: theatrical skill and intelligence, spontaneity and confidence. And it opens the more intuitive and unconscious parts of ourselves, inside the cloak of performance. Permission to become all that you are.
To tread on naked boards
Into the empty space
Is to call and to breach
The tight skinned edges of yourself
Take a risk my friend
Drink a pint-sized death if necessary
But don’t
Don’t let judgment stitch
An enemy spy
Into your shadow’s skin
From The Empty Space, written for Al’s Theatre of the Ordinary · Spotify · SoundCloud
Al called this positive feedback, and he believed that anyone can and should perform. He died on 8 September 2026, at home in Ballarat.
Al Wunder, centre, with his son Francis — visiting me in Auckland, 20 February 2024.
Al Wunder, often referred to as ‘the Grandfather of Improvisation’, died peacefully at our home in Ballarat on September 8th 2026. He was also a penguin! Al’s generous, gentle and kind spirit will definitely be missed. He inspired many through his humility and simple genius.
— Lynden Nicholls, Al’s wife
There is a documentary about his life and his teaching, and it will tell you more about where this comes from than I can here.
The Wonder of Improvisation: The Story of Al Wunder
Vimeo On Demand
Two Thousand Steps
A song written to honour Al and all my teachers including myself · Spotify · SoundCloud
The room
Living Theatre was founded in Auckland in 2000 and has run every week since: twenty-six years unbroken, now on Waiheke. More than five hundred people have come through it. Half the current class have been coming for over ten years.
They are mostly not actors. The room includes a somatic practitioner who directed Leadership New Zealand, a filmmaker who lectured at AUT and served as Deputy Chair of the Waiheke Local Board, and the chair of an international network on science and consciousness. They have been turning up on the same night for more than a decade.
"I have watched people arrive at that class carrying a week of their lives and, within an hour, find a way to put it into movement and voice that they could not have found in conversation."
— Louise Marra, Somatic Experiencing practitioner, founder of Unity House
"I have stood opposite him while a character was being found in front of an audience."
— Dr Shirin Brown, filmmaker, former lecturer, AUT
Waiheke Playback Theatre
Director and teacher since 2008.
Someone tells a true story from their life, and the company plays it back immediately, without rehearsal, while the teller watches their own experience given form in front of the room. The troupe meets weekly and performs publicly through the year.
Background
Theatre Corporate Acting School, Auckland. Diploma of Drama, University of Auckland. John Bolton Physical Theatre School, Melbourne. Ten years with Al Wunder. Fifty-six productions as a performer, Clown Doctor at Starship Children's Hospital for seven years, and New Zealand's representative at the International Improvisational Festival in Lyon in 2010.
Come along
Every Tuesday, 7.15–9.15pm
Palm Beach Hall, Palm Beach
Classes are koha.
Email for more info if you want to turn up or ask any questions: hello@stephenhollins.com
