Open Rehearsal: Trainers…

Hester is a director and artist based in London. They are Thinker-in-Residence (Young People, Gender & Live Art) at the Live Art Development Agency and a Fellow of the Centre for Contemporary Theatre at Birkbeck University. Directing work includes That Night Follows Day (co-directed with Tim Etchells) for Forced Entertainment at The Southbank Centre (as well as versions in South Korea and China), the national tour of the trans-positive pantomime A Pair of Pantos (as writer and director), and Ten Plagues (Mark Ravenhill's song cycle for Marc Almond). They also curated the exhibition In Visible Ink - Queer Heroes for the National Theatre, and Queer Upstairs (with Mark Ravenhill) for The Royal Court, where they are currently under commission as a 2020 Jerwood New Playwright. Hester has been collaborating with internationally renowned performance company Forced Entertainment since 2009 and established the company's Participation strand, founding their young company Art Breakers. From 2008-18 Hester was Artistic Director of GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN, before starting up Hester Chillingworth Company in 2019 for their own work, which includes a trilogy of shows currently in progress to premier in 2021.

Sylvan Oswald is a US based, award-winning interdisciplinary artist who creates plays, texts and video. His language driven work uses meta-theatricality and formal irreverence to challenge structures of identity. Recent work includes a phantasmagorical western High Winds (X Artists’ Books) and the lo-fi web series Outtakes exploring trans identity (outtakestv.com). A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, Sylvan is currently assistant professor of playwriting at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film & Television, an affiliated artist at Clubbed Thumb and an alum of New Dramatists.