Cat Gerrard (she/her) is a performer, storyteller, dramaturg and facilitator from London based in Berlin. She trained in acting at Drama Studio London and in collaborative performance-making at LISPA.
Cat’s work is multi-disciplinary and always created in an intuitive, devised, collaborative process. She has found herself constantly circling around the theme and embodiment of connection: how to find different ways, often in different spaces, to bring audiences into a playful encounter with performers. As Founder/Artistic Director of storytelling company TailSpin, she curated and ran the monthly storytelling evening - Night of the Storyteller- and annual festival - The Story Bazaar - in London for 5 years, alongside collaborator Bel Sherlock. TailSpin events created communal space for sharing story and experimenting with form and became a strong community hub for artists and audience.
Cat has long explored site-specific work as both performer and dramaturg as a vital way to connect with new audiences and as a way to connect artists and audiences to spaces in new ways: from pop-up puppetry projects; to performances in woods and on table tennis tables; to dance in galleries, museums and other spaces outside traditional theatrical spaces.
Photo by Jonas Zeidler
Cat’s work – and life – is strongly influenced by story, storycarrying and storytelling – from the personal to the mythic, the individual to the collective. She is never-endingly curious about how we might embody story and metaphor, how we can re-story ourselves and re-vivify our imaginations in what her teacher Martin Shaw has called the current “pandemic of the literal”.
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In 2015, Cat began facilitating at LISPA (later arthaus.berlin), teaching across the breadth of the MA/MFA pedagogy and, later on, on the BA Acting course at Cours Florent Berlin, teaching foundational and applied breathing and voice techniques. She is a guest lecturer for a number of other schools, programmes and workshops. Her work draws on: different aspects of the LeCoq pedagogy; the practice and philosophy of Tai Chi; the principles and performative forms of puppetry and storytelling; and her practices as a dramaturg. She is constantly developing and evolving her facilitation work: see the Research & Teaching page for more details.
Cat took her training and early experience in directing (on the Young Vic Director’s Programme, London) and channeled it into what seemed more precise: working as a dramaturg. She dramaturgs primarily for nonverbal theatre and dance and seeks to integrate the various elements of a process: including the dynamics and interplay between the personal, interpersonal and artistic/transpersonal elements that are in each creative process.
Some of the projects and collaborations she is most proud of are: "Undercurrents/Podziemne PrÄ…dy" (Adi Weinberg); "Entre Deux" (101concrete); “If The Bull Won’t Come” (Adi Weinberg); “The Fantasist” (Theatre Témoin); “Cycles of the Southern Wild” (TailSpin); “Somewhere, Maybe Here” (Cat Gerrard).
When she is not doing all of the above, Cat is usually on her bike, practicing martial arts or sitting in a café reading something chewy.
You can read more about Cat and her work in her newsletter on Substack.