Luke’s work as a theatre director and performance maker has embraced Love and the Revolution with the Berliner Ensemble, The Golem with Theater Brostowska in Prague and Bratislava, Age of the Saints in Dublin, the British tour of Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter, UK productions of Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair and the musicals Blood Brothers, Jesus Christ Superstar and Oliver, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens’ Blue Wedding in Oxford, A Midsummer Night’s Dream in South Africa, Sweetness & Light in London and Colchester, A Summer of Ecosex in France and England, and Mulheres de Shakespeare in Brazil.
In London the devised site specific pieces have included Singing the Body Electric (Serpentine Gallery), It’s a Wonderful Life (Marylebone Station), The Cherry Orchard (Conway Hall), and Chasing the Butterfly (National Portrait Gallery).
His productions for theatre nomad, of which he was Artistic Director for 20 years, included all-female versions of Macbeth and Hamlet, cross-dressed productions of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night and As You Like It, and an erotic celebration of Anita Berber in Triumphant Desire. These productions have been seen in China, North America, South Africa, Germany, France, Poland, Russia, Czech and Slovak Republics, Spain and the UK.
Luke’s academic and teaching work has included Senior Lecturer at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University South Africa, Senior Lecturer at Middlesex University, and Visiting Lecturer at UFRGE (University of Porto Alegre) Brazil, Dalhousie University Canada, Institute of American Indian Arts and the College of Santa Fe in the US. He has led residencies at The Banff Centre Canada, run workshops around the world and taught widely in the London drama schools and colleges.
Internationally known for his innovative performance workshops, Luke was from 2002 to 2009 Artistic Director of the International Workshop Festival bringing leading theatre practitioners from around the world to the UK to run workshops, give performances and demonstrations and create work. Highlights included Kwoto, a group of young actors from the Displaced Peoples Camps of Khartoum; Falos & Stercus, the Brazilian fetish circus; and from Finland, the fire performance collective Flamma.
As a key member of The Conway Collective Luke was one of a group of leading performance makers creating and curating work at London’s Conway Hall (2012 – 2018) from live art and spoken word to dance spectaculars. For six years the Collective dared to dream of a better world and produced 68 events and 300 workshops with more than 1,000 artists.
Publishes regularly on performance, and was for some years a contributing editor to the journal Performance. Luke’s book, PLAY-ACTING, a guide to theatre workshops is published by Methuen in the UK and by Routledge in the US and is a widely used text in drama schools. His four best-selling Good Audition Guides to Shakespeare are published by Nick Hern Books, and his Creating Solo Performance (with Sean Bruno) is published by Routledge.
Luke’s Doctorate is in The Performance of Gender. Current practice and research interests include the performer’s relationship with space, eroticism and performance, and the psychology of acting.
Luke is currently working international performance collective The Sharing, and creating eco-activist environmental performance.
LUKE’S BOOKS CAN BE BOUGHT ON HIS AMAZON PAGE
email: luke@lukedixon.co.uk