Director
RECENT PROJECTS
Since 2009, I have acted and directed under the professional name Jonathan Busby. Following my graduation from the three year Acting BA at Drama Centre London, I founded the Aporia Theatre. Our production of Cardenio (a rare and highly disputed Jacobean revenge tragedy edited by myself and Luis del Aguila) has played at various London and national venues in three different iterations.
I am in the research and development phase of our next production, an epopee concerning Napoleon Bonaparte. We aim to open this production in 2016.
Our potential repertoire is vast and contains a variety of never-performed plays from interesting and highly unusual writers.
Stylistically and practically, I draw a great deal of influence from Ariane Mnouchkine, Georgio Strehler, Peter Brook, Tadeusz Kantor, Satoshi Miyagi, Eugenio Barba and many others.
Cardenio, by Shakespeare & Fletcher or Middleton Rose Bankside, 2012 (DVD available)
Cardenio at The Dell
Mythology (Anat/Ba'al) workshops at the National Theatre
Cardenio at the Warehouse Theatre Croydon (closed), 2010
I have attended workshops with leading theatrical companies, most recently with Ariane Mnouchkine herself in Oxford. Our work focuses on non-naturalistic and ritualised moments of drama, seeking to discover moments of sacredness within secular drama through the investigation of ritualised theatre forms such as Japanese Noh.
Despite the ideological similarities between our work and that of the aforementioned practitioners, our productions are not derivative and each production develops its own, unique theatrical form.
As well as directing productions, I have also led a number of workshops with Aporia actor and performers from outside our ranks. I am currently a post-graduate researcher at Plymouth University investigating modes and understandings of the word 'presence' in performance disciplines.
If you are interested in working with Aporia or would simply like to know about our work or pick my brain about anything theatrical, please get in touch!